At 2020-09-28T15:44:46+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > I did mean .SH: > > For each type we're separating the paragraphs by description, > conforming to, see also, ... similar to the .SH sections. Okay, I see; you were using an analogy. > And therefore, I thought that we should use the same format for > consistency: After the title, or in this case the tag, > there should be no blank line. > > However, if using .br is a big headache, I would rather not use > workarounds (as you proposed in an earlier email), > and instead just live with the blank line. It's not much of a > problem. Was an actual decision taken on this? I see patches continuing to roll in containing this .br-based pattern. I think if the extra line is live-withable, it should be lived with (or one of my four proposed alternatives could be used :) ), in preference to setting the bad example of the "naked" .br requests. man page markup is highly prone to cargo-culting; on the groff list not too long ago, some sleuthing revealed an example of a typo that crept into the X Window System man pages over 30 years ago and was not only diligently retained there but faithfully copied elsewhere by people who didn't realize what they were copying[1]. > I leave it up to you to decide what to do, Michael. > > My proposals: > If you prefer consistency in the source, I'd rather not use > workarounds: I'd just leave .PP, and accept the blank line > I see those workarounds uglier than .br. Too bad for me. But I admit I'm not proud of that .TQ thing. :P > If you however prefer consistency in the visual page, That's not how it appears to me; I may be bringing too much insider knowledge to the question, but I know when I see them that the things you've termed section headings aren't true section headings. Primarily I can tell by the fact that their indentation is wrong for an .SH macro. But the knowledge isn't all that far inside. The worst hand-written man page I have ever seen in my life, or expect to see, was written by Albert Cahalan, who hated *roff with a passion I have reserved only for love affairs. He learned just enough of the language to subvert man-db and groff into accepting his plain-text document as a man page[2]. I don't know what ever became of Mr. Cahalan, but I imagine that he is somewhere working on processing Markdown with XML:FO and enjoying himself immensely. Regards, Branden [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2019-03/msg00047.html [2] https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/blob/7ac9a0e1f5606696dc799b773d5ec70183ca91a3/ps/ps.1
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