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/
