Hello Alejandro, Alejandro Colomar wrote on Thu, Aug 07, 2025 at 01:04:21PM +0200:
> Do we want to diagnose blank lines in input before TH? > > alx@debian:~/tmp$ cat blank.man | nl -ba > 1 > 2 .TH a 2 d f > 3 .SH foo > 4 > 5 foo > alx@debian:~/tmp$ groff -man -Tutf8 -wbreak -rCHECKSTYLE=3 blank.man > an.tmac:blank.man:4: style: blank line in input > > a(2) System Calls Manual a(2) > > foo > foo > > f d a(2) > > It seems inconsistent to not diagnose that. FWIW: $ printf "\n.TH\n\n" | mandoc -Tlint mandoc: <stdin>:2:2: WARNING: missing manual title, using UNTITLED: TH mandoc: <stdin>:2:2: WARNING: missing manual section, using "": TH UNTITLED mandoc: <stdin>:2:2: WARNING: missing date, using "": TH $ printf "\n.Dd\n\n" | mandoc -Tlint mandoc: <stdin>:1:1: WARNING: blank line in fill mode, using .sp mandoc: <stdin>:3:1: WARNING: blank line in fill mode, using .sp mandoc: <stdin>:2:2: WARNING: missing date, using "": Dd mandoc: <stdin>: WARNING: missing manual title, using UNTITLED: EOF mandoc: <stdin>: WARNING: missing Os macro, using "" mandoc: <stdin>:1:1: WARNING: content before first section header: sp That is, mandoc(1) only warns about blank lines in mdoc(7) documents, not in man(7) documents. The reason is that so far, i judged the average quality of man(7) documents in the wild low enough that warning about this minor detail felt too noisy to me. In typical man(7) documents, there are bigger fish to fry. In mdoc(7), on the other hand, it doesn't matter where the blank line occurs - before the preamble macros, among the preamble macros, or in the document body. The mandoc(1) program warns in any case. Actually, a blank line *before* the body even causes two warnings: "blank line in fill mode" and "content before first section header". Yours, Ingo
