In medieval manuscripts such as the Domesday Book, "strikethrough" of text with red ink often functions as highlighting similar to modern underline.
[4] Wordstar was launched in 1978, it dominated the personal computer market as the most popular word processing program until 1985 when Wordperfect took that role.
In plain text scenarios where markup cannot be used, Unicode offers a number of combining characters that achieve similar effects.
This is for added clarity, as in complex kanji a single strikethrough may be missed or confused with a stroke in the character.
Strikethrough made using the letter X or a forward slash (/) instead of a horizontal line is possible in word processors, spreadsheets, presentations and graphics diagramming applications of certain office suites such as Collabora Online and LibreOffice.
Since at least 2014, researchers in the area of optical character recognition have attempted to solve the problem of recognizing struck-out text in handwritten documents.