No Underlining of Text? Why?

[Colby Fulton]

The real reason is that Adobe doesn’t care about wasting people’s time. Creating a line to underline text takes 10x longer and doesn’t move with the text. It’s a stupid, thoughtless mistake, much like the haphazard choice of keyshorts across Adobe software. Inconsistent, stupid, lazy choices are made by incompetent Adobe employees everyday, and the lack of underlining is just one more example of this. I spend a lot of money on your programs, and stupid little decisions like this eat up my day and cause a great deal of wasted time… which is very valuable.

Just fix it and stop making excuses.

[Todd Kopriva]

Colby, if you want to request a feature, you can do so here:
https://www.adobe.com/go/wish

This specific feature has not been in the top 100 features requested in the past several years. We don’t want to waste our time doing something that very few people have asked for.

Your characterization of us as lazy and incompetent doesn’t agree with my personal experience of the people developing After Effects.

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
———————————————————————————————————

[Colby Fulton]

I joke, but you guys are doing a great job. Please don’t think of your work as a waste of time! Just because something’s difficult, doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. Accomplishing the worthwhile goal of underlined type would help your team build confidence in yourselves, and contribute to a pattern of success that other Adobe employees might be inspired by. This small gesture may help the entire company come together and resolve, for example, the inconsistent keyboard shortcuts. The team working on Illustrator might be inspired to adopt Command-i to import files. Wouldn’t that be something! Then the team over at InDesign might do the same. If both those groups do it, realizing that it makes sense to have consistency among programs that are designed to work together, maybe the team at Flash might realize that Command-r is a stupid keyboard shortcut for importing files and also adopt command-i. It could all begin by proving that the After Effects team aren’t just a group of time wasters waiting for people to suggest useful features, and have some initiative. I have confidence in the After Effects team. I’ve been using your software for 20 years, back when it was created by CoSA. Now those guys really created something special! I know it has been slowly improved over the years, but don’t stop now. After all, it could revolutionize the entire Adobe corporation… and possibly, the world.

[Colby Fulton]

Your example is not effective, while mine is.

[VanHieu Vo]

Are you sure about that? InDesign, a program used specifically for handling typography, has very robust features for both underlines and strikethroughs. What does “bad” even mean? Typographically discouraged? What about use cases that aren’t strictly about typography or even aesthetics? Also, based on what authority? This, if anything, is more of an example of Adobe assuming nobody would use it or there isn’t that much of a demand, as with lots of other typographic features, so there’s really no point in implementing it (it’s probably not that easy to implement in the first place, especially with animated text).