Underlined Bullets.

[stevegill]

Hi,

Anyone know why bullets show underlines when the bulleted text is underlined?

The image on the left shows the bullets and underlined text in XDP X16. The image on the right shows the same bullets and underlined text in a browser.



= Steve

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Steve, I can only confirm your findings. Using underline also underlines the bullet in most browsers!

A workaround is to set the bulleted text to a hyperlink, this underlines the text but not the bullet. Problem is you may not want a link nor a pointing finger indicating a link.

Further workaround place a white rectangle above bulleted text with a 99% transparency.

Not ideal

[Boy]

If this is a bug, another workaround would be to replace the text underlines with separate underlines and softgroup them with the text.

[Acorn]

If all hinges on how you underline.

Xara's approach to Bullets is to break the line into a set of SPANs with the Bullet as a font character preceding the following text.

If you underline all the lines of text at once the linebreak is effectively underlined as well so the underline is continuous through the next Bullet.

All you need do is underline each line of text individually so the underline ends with it and starts with the next line of text, bypassing the Bullets.
The gap between the Bullet and the text is not underlined as Xara doesn't use a character for the gap it just positions the SPANs to be separated.

This also happens in Microsoft Office for bullet colouring so it is poor understanding and code design failures, or unintended consequences to be more polite.
It is unfortunate that Xara, in rendering for the web, adopts this approach. It is even worse in its SmartShapes Tables. Neither are a good solution, especially for those with vision impairment using screen readers.
It is nigh impossible to CSS manipulate Xara's bulleting (I use unordered lists for NavBars).

Acorn

[stevegill]

Thanks Egg, Boy and Acorn.

Each list item is actually a hyperlink linked to anchored text. I had the Use common website link colors checkbox unchecked because I personally don't like this feature. Each text item was underlined individually but for some reason the bullets were still underlined.

So what I've done is remove the underlining and checked the Use common website link colors checkbox, but changed the colours used to the same colour as the text. That way the underlining works correctly and I don't get those garish colours (yes, I know I could change them to something more suitable).

Thanks again for your suggestions and assistance.

= Steve