Re: [Quilt-dev] [patch 02/26] Eliminate or replace blank lines.

[Jean Delvare]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2022 08:31:44 -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2018-06-17T22:26:00+0200, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > On Sat, 16 Jun 2018 12:22:34 -0400, g.branden.robinson@gmail.com wrote:  
> > > Blank lines are bad roff style.  Per CSTR #54, blank lines are the
> > > equivalent of ".sp 1", but in GNU roff this can be overridden with a
> > > blank line macro (".blm"), and all macro packages for text
> > > formatting (mm, ms, me, man, etc.) have macros for paragraph
> > > separation, and the inter-paragraph spacing is usually different
> > > from ".sp 1" for typesetter output (this can be seen in PostScript
> > > and PDF output).  Explicit spacing is also unnecessary immediately
> > > adjacent to section headings.
> > > 
> > > See section 5.3 of CSTR #54, "Troff User's Manual", Ossanna &
> > > Kernighan <https://www.troff.org/54.pdf>.  
> > 
> > Hmmm. I see the improvement in the formatted output, but the absence
> > of blank lines in the man page "source" make it pretty hard to read
> > now. I would appreciate some form of spacing at least before each
> > section to make it easier to navigate whenever a developer needs to
> > edit the document. Does roff provide no way to achieve this?  
> 
> I believe this item was resolved with a decision to use the empty
> request.
> 
> https://www.mail-archive.com/quilt-dev@nongnu.org/msg02456.html

Yes, that's what I ended up doing, thanks.

-- 
Jean Delvare
SUSE L3 Support