Underlinng? easy. How do I overline?

users
#1

Libreoffice community:

Underlining is a common task in LO, and it is easy. Control U. But I need to overline (also called overscore or overbar), some text, in my case digits. Overlining is common in scientific fields, and I use it to indicate a shift, a motion of the hand, on double bass music.

How do I do this? I'd like to have a font, not unlike the underline font. (I hope I'm not missing something here.)

With Warmest Regaard
David Teague

#2

DavidBTeagueAt Comporium.net wrote

Underlining is a common task in LO, and it is easy. Control U. But I
need to overline (also called overscore or overbar), some text, in my
case digits. Overlining is common in scientific fields, and I use it to
indicate a shift, a motion of the hand, on double bass music.

How do I do this? I'd like to have a font, not unlike the underline
font. (I hope I'm not missing something here.)

Two simple ways, results will vary by font.

A. this is artificial in that it does not follow the font designers intent,
but gives clean "calculated" overlines of various forms.
1) enter the text string
2) select what needs overline
3) context menu select "Character" dialog
4) in character dialog -> Font affects tab
5) "Overlining" drop list to select desired effect

B. this uses the font designers specification, OK for a symbol but does not
work well for words or sentences.
1) enter the text string
2) advance cursor over each character and enter <l-Alt>+X
3) character will convert to its Unicode point, e.g. A -> U+0040, a ->
U+0060
4) append the Unicode combining glyph to each character; i.e. for COMBINING
OVERLINE U+0305, or COMBINING DOUBLE OVERLINE U+033F, or COMBINING DOUBLE
MACRON U+035e, or other from the Unicode block 0300-036F
5) merge the characters with another <l-Alt>+X at the end of each Unicode
string.

#3

There is a font called "ScaleDegrees" in Windows and "Times + Musical"
in linux and Mac which I use when writing about music because its
specialty is having the digits 1 thro 9 with a ^ over each digit - used
to refer to scale degrees in melodic analysis. It also has nice glyphs
for sharps, flats and naturals.

It is available free from Matthew Hindson's website :
http://hindson.com.au/info/free/free-fonts-available-for-download/

It should be relatively easy to transform the glyphs with the ^ over
them into a glyph with an overline. Looks like it could be accomplished
using FontForge which is an open source font editor. Downloads available
for Windows, Mac and linux :

https://fontforge.github.io/

HTH
Philip