.TQ to replace .PD 0

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi, Branden!

For the following existing usage of the deprecated .PD 0
I tried to use .TQ in a way that I'm not sure if it's correct by just 
reading groff_man(7):

[
.PD 0
.TP
tag1
Some text here.
.TP
tag2
Some more text.
.PD
]

The above produces:

[
tag1   Some text here.
tag2   Some more text.
]

I (succesfully) tried the following:

[
.TP
tag1
Some text here.
.TQ
Some more text.
]

But I didn't see the manual documenting this kind of usage for .TQ.
The manual page seems to imply that there should be no text between .TP 
and the successive .TQ tags (as that is probably thew most common use 
case for it; or not necessarily the most common, but the most specific 
to it, since it's hard to replicate it with other macros).  Am I using 
some undefined behavior that happens to behave as one (I?) would expect? 
 Or is it an intended but misdocumented feature?  Is it portable across 
systems that have TQ?

I read mandoc_roff(7), as Ingo usually points me to it and usually has 
exactly what I'm looking for, and once again it seems to bring light:

       TQ   Like TP, except that no vertical spacing is inserted
            before the paragraph.  This is  a  non‐standard  GNU
            extension  and  very  rarely used even in GNU manual
            pages.

This one makes it clear that it can be used for what I did.  I think 
groff_man(7) is missing this basic description of TQ.

BTW, how much unportable is TQ?  I guess it's still preferable to PD.


mandoc(1) seems to produce the same output on my Debian as groff(1). 
And neither groff(1) 1.23 nor mandoc complain about it:

$ cat ./tq.7
.TH TQ 7 2022-05-21 alx experiments
.SH No blank lines between tagged paragraphs
.TP
tag1
Some text here.
.TQ
tag2
Some more text.
$ groff -man -t -rCHECKSTYLE=3 -ww -z ./tq.7
$ mandoc -man -Tlint ./tq.7
$


Cheers,

Alex


--
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/