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

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Branden,

On Sat, 16 Jun 2018 12:22:34 -0400, address@hidden 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?

-- 
Jean Delvare
SUSE L3 Support