Underline and Overline

[Bedazzled532]

Hi,

I have some text in arabic language. I need some dots to be underline and some to be overline.

Issue is that the dots are zerowidth characters. (Screenshot attached). I am using underline feature but I need the underline OR overline only under or over the text.  (Screenshot attached)

How can I achieve this? Paragraph rules wont work here.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

What's wrong with Character Style Underline setting? 

[Bedazzled532]

Yes. The current output screenshot file attached has character style
applied. The required screenshot attached has been done manually.

[Joel Cherney]

That's an odd requirement. You're right, the Paragraph Rule won't work. Neither will the Underline tool, at least as you've stated it. So, what are your actual requirements here? You could simulate this appearance with e.g. each zero-width character padded out with spaces on each side, with the underline applied to the spaces as well. You have each diacritic separated with an em space in your sample; why not this? Underlined spaces are Totally Normal Spaces, and the separator spaces are en-spaces:

[Bedazzled532]

@Joel Cherney Thank you so much for the tip. I would have followed the same step. Issue is they are separated by Tabs and not em-space. I used em-space just for example so that it is readable by the adobe community here.

One alternative I see is that make a separate textframe for each diacritic or use tables. This is my last preference.

[Joel Cherney]

Well, there are still lots of other ways, which might be more or less useful depending on what you're trying to do with this. If they're separated with tabs, and you only have a few of them, it's easy enough to manually add spaces on either side of your diacritics. If you have lots of diacritics, it'd be easy to write a little GREP query that would only find Arabic diacritics and replace them with diacritics with spaces on either side.

If the method of padding  your diacritics with underlineable spaces won't work, then you could just as easily manually add anchored objects: