[Groff] Spurious whitelines

[Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai]

Hi,

I need some help in debugging this problem.

With the FreeBSD project we use groff primarily as the formatter for our
manpages.

I recently updated our groff to 1.15 in the hope that a problem we've
been having for some time now has been fixed.  Unfortunately, it hasn't.

When I nroff -man (or nroff -mdoc) a manpage and view it, I get random
whitelines where no-one would expect them.  I verified the mdoc mark-up
of the pages involved and I am absolutely sure that it isn't a problem
in the manpages themselves.

A small example from a manpage I wrote when looked at through nroff
-mdoc elf.5 | more:

                   SHT_DYNAMIC   This section holds information for dynamic
                                 linking. An object file may have only one dy-


                                 namic section.
                   SHT_NOTE      This section holds information that marks the

The manpage macros involved:

.It Dv SHT_DYNAMIC
This section holds information for dynamic linking. An object file may
have only one dynamic section.
.It Dv SHT_NOTE
This section holds information that marks the file in some way.

So you see that there is absolutely no reason to just format it like
that.  And they're too irregular to be on page boundaries in case you
might wonder.

So I would appreciate any ideas to hunt this problem down.

Thanks,

-- 
Jeroen Ruigrok vd W/Asmodai         address@hidden|bart.nl|freebsd.org]
Documentation nutter/B-rated Coder BSD: Technical excellence at its best  
The BSD Programmer's Documentation Project <http://home.wxs.nl/~asmodai>
How the gods kill...