(Glyph on brick from Zen's photostream on Flickr.)
I was wondering why if there was a "_", why there wasn't a complementary symbol that is at the top of the line, an "overscore" if you will? You might think of it as the carport of type. Or an omega to the underscore's omega.
I asked some of the world's top graphic designers at work, Mimi and Ken, if they had ideas or if such a character existed (These folks went to the world renowned art school at Yale for their graduate degrees in Graphic Design. Check out this year's student exhibition).
No luck.
Mimi and I even opened up the Glyphs for the Times typeface in InDesign and couldn't find one. There is an overbar, the symbol you might see over an e in the English language to indicate a long "e" sound like "eeek" or "eediot." But in the Times set, the overbar is significantly shorter than I'd like it to be. Mimi explained that if I wanted to I could design my own typeface. Alternatively, I could use some adjustment features to move the underscore up. Now, I have no real need for the overscore (yet). So I suppose I'm going to let this one ruminate for a bit.
