fontmacospages
When I underline a word with Pages 5.5.3 on OS X.
For the fonts I use, the underline goes very close to the text, much closer than it is common with Microsoft Word.
Just as "tracking" controls how close the next line of text follows the previous, I want to adjust the "tracking" space to lower the underline.
Is there any way to control this and give more space between the text and the underline?
I wasn't able to reproduce this on a MacBook Air running Mac OS X 10.6.6 and Safari 5.0.3. When I press backspace (it's called delete on my keyboard), it doesn't cause the carat to jump to the next word.
Perhaps it's some 3rd party software interfering with your keyboard?
You cannot disable these swashes using the Smart Swashes section in the Format » Font » Show Fonts » Typography… window, because they're not Word Final Swashes. Those are disabled by default anyway.
What you're seeing are Line Final Swashes, applied only to the end of a line or a text run with consistent formatting.
I found no option to disable them from the Typography window or any menu option.
What seems to work is to end a line by pressing Shift-Return instead of Return.
Note that this will not end the paragraph and allow you to apply a different paragraph style to the second line, so depending on your circumstances (e.g. use in Headings), this will not be an optimal solution.
You can, for example, make the next line font size 1 and only insert a single space character. In the following example, I entered a single A character of font size 1 to the next line so it's visible as a black dot:
It's an ugly hack, but it might work for you.
Best Answer
Pages does not expose this control and from experimentation using large font face sizing (96 and above), it appears the spacing between the underline and the characters varies on the typeface selected.
For example - see Courier and Courier New - the second font has a much larger spacing than the first.
It looks like you'd need a tool to edit the typeface or choose a typeface that matches your expectations. It is a bit surprising now that I look how close the underline hews to the characters for Pages default styles.