groff
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[Groff] paragraphs and .TS/.TE in man macros


From: Werner LEMBERG
Subject: [Groff] paragraphs and .TS/.TE in man macros
Date: Sun, 04 Feb 2007 08:41:47 +0100 (CET)

Eric,


due to your increased usage of .TS/.TE I noticed the following problem
in man pages:

To properly indent a table (which isn't centered), code like the
following is appropriate:

  .IP
  .TS
  ...

However, this has the disadvantage that you get *two* empty lines
because both .IP and .TS move vertically.  I could revert my change to
.TS to insert vertical space (done about 5 years ago by actually
defining .TS and .TE which were undefined previously), however I
consider it convenient that .TS acts like a paragraph starter, but
this may be a groff extension probably.

My idea is to have all paragraph macros in man ending with `.ns' so
that any vertical space inserted immediately afterwards gets ignored.

Do you see any disadvantage?  Can you check your man page corpus
whether authors ever use a combination of .IP/.LP/.PP/.P/.HP just for
the purpose of getting two empty lines?  This ugly anyway, but...

The alternative is to modify .TS as described above.

Opinions, please.


    Werner




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]