Re: .TQ to replace .PD 0

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Branden,

On 5/21/22 17:21, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> In groff(7), I'm piloting "begin list" and "end list" macros to provide
> a path out of the elaborate page-private macro system that the page has
> used for many years.  They are even simpler than TQ.
>
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/man/groff.7.man#n225

I recommend naming them LS/LE (list start, list end), for symmetry with 
RS/RE (and slightly with others such as UR/UE.  LS also happens to be a 
nice name for list.

> Pretty much the only thing people ever use "PD" to do is to set the
> inter-paragraph distance zero, and restore it to its previous value.  It
> therefore doesn't need an argument to process.  Further, if people _try_
> to set the inter-paragraph distance to something larger than 1 line in
> nroff mode, man-db man(1) will strip the extra lines out.
>
> There is thus not much use case for anything but
>    .PD 0
> and
>    .PD
> .

Does .PD 0 suffer from the reasons that led to the deprecation of .PD?
Or is .PD 0 safe from that and can be used portably for compacting in 
HTML or PDF output?

> And, from what I've seen, pretty much the only reason people ever want
> to change the inter-paragraph distance in the first place is to do the
> above: to compactly present an itemized or enumerated list.

Yes.  I haven't seen in a different context yet.

> This idea, along with one or two other mild man(7) reforms, is something
> I've put on the shelf until after we get groff 1.23.0 out.

Do you have an idea of when that can be (1.23.0)?


Regards,

Alex

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