A last missing link for interoperable representation

[Marcel Schneider via Unicode]

Previous discussions have already brought up how Unicode is supporting
those languages that despite being old in Unicode still require special
attention for their peculiar way of spacing punctuation or indicating
abbreviations. Now I wonder whether s̲t̲r̲e̲s̲s̲ can likewise be noted
in plain text without non-traditional markup such as *…* or …'… when a
language does not accept extra acute accents for that purpose.

One character we can think of is the combining underline.
Like everything else—new letters, narrow no-break space, superscripts—
the quality of the rendering depends on the fonts used on the computer.

Strings containing U+0332 COMBINING LOW LINE to denote stress, as a
replacement of italic, may be postprocessed to apply formatting, or
used as-is if interoperability matters along with semantic accuracy.

Best wishes,

Marcel