Re: Space after .E[dl...]?

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Thomas,

Thomas Klausner wrote on Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 01:54:26PM +0100:
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 01:31:19AM +0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote:

>> However, this is not just a question of what we like better,
>> but also a question of compatibility.  There are three aspects
>> to compatibility:

> I understand your point. Most (if not all) mdoc man pages that a
> typical BSD user is interested in will come with their operating
> system though, so I don't see it as such a big hindrance as you do,
> because we can fix them.

There are several ports containing mdoc(7) manuals.
Besides, it would be a pain if moving manuals from one
operating system to another would require fixing up the
manual source code because of language incompatibilities.
I'd rather reduce such incompatibilies than deliberately
add to them.

>> (3) There are thousands of real-world manuals written for the
>> old behaviour.  Quite probably, there are some that will look
>> worse after the change because the additional blank line is not
>> an improvement in their particular case, even if it is in many
>> other cases, and the authors of course relied on the fact that
>> there is no blank line.  Before even proposing this change in
>> the language definition, i'd like some rough estimate, or at
>> least feeling, how many pages might be affected by this effect,
>> and how much effort we are imposing on people like jmc@ to
>> clean up the tree after the change.

> For backwards compat, I'd like to have Pp after El etc. ignored;

For sure; in mandoc, that would be more or less automatic;
in groff, i don't really know.

> this should fix this problem.

Er, no, i tried to talk about the reverse problem:
Existing pages that do not have a .Pp after .Ed or .El
because the author did not intend a blank line at that place.

Yours,
  Ingo
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