Underline or not

Within a very short time of mailing our latest Format newsletter (No.86, which you can get by sending a blank email to our autoresponder at getformat@worsleypress.com) I had these comments from Lyn:

This issue has been brought up a number of times in the Adobe User-to-user forum for Pagemaker Windows, and the solution offered is basically - don't use underlining. When I suggested this in a recent thread (http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?128@251.gxcecmRM0yT.1@.3bb5795d) I was roundly criticised for being a member of "the typography police [who] have outlawed underlining" and that I had given "pompous advice not to use underlining". I'm glad to know there are others who agree with the opinion I offered.

The comments in Format started over a newspaper publisher finding that at least some problems with mysterious black boxes appearing in PDFs of pages could be tracked to underlines which had disappeared from text on a completely different part of the tabloid page.