During those humble beginnings of iPad—that is, before the powerful iOS 5 was born—people were all concerned about how they can underline or highlight text on iPad when the Apple’s very own Mail app doesn’t have any specific buttons for performing such actions. Purists might do just fine without these formatting options, but not the professional email writers. They are most likely to prefer richly formatted texts to dull, plain scripts. It’s not actually for novelty, as some people sees it; rather it’s more for putting emphasis and clarity that the “Underline” command is being needed as much as the Copy-Paste tandem.
While iPad can let you type special characters, it is not until the unveiling of the new iOS that text formatting features were made available. It’s not uncommon to see users creating their emails on other apps, nor is the copy-pasting of the HTML-formatted texts from a compatible app to the local Mail. Good thing you don’t need to go through all these hassles anymore since the iOS 5 now allows you to underline or highlight text on iPad.
iPad users can now enjoy the “BIU” capabilities in their Mail App. So if you’re already on iOS 5, here’s how you can perform little formatting tricks to your email texts:
- Open the Mail app by tapping the launcher icon.
- Write your message inside the specified text field.
- Now that you’ve finished typing (it is recommended that you finish writing your email first since you can’t vary the format once you’ve started using a particular formatting), select the words that you want to highlight and underline. You’ll do this by tapping on the desired word, choosing “Select” and stretching out the corners of the selection.
- You have now successfully highlighted the text/s. The next step is to underline them. The “Cut/Copy/Paste” menu will appear after highlighting the word and you should press the right arrow to roll over to the next menu which includes the “BIU” or the “Bold, Italicize and Underline”. Selecting the appropriate button will instantly update the formatting of the texts.
- Since you want to underline or highlight text on iPad, press the “Underline” to enable formatting.