Re: [Groff] paragraphs and .TS/.TE in man macros

[Eric S. Raymond]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden>:
> Do you see any disadvantage?  Can you check your man page corpus
> whether authors ever use a combination of .IP/.LP/.PP/.P/.HP just for
> the purpose of getting two empty lines? 

I have *never*, in fact, seen this done.  If it were to happen, the doclifter
translation would fail to validate because it would genrate an empty 
<para></para> tag pair, which would then fail validation -- <para> is
required to have content.  So both my eyeballs and the doclifter torture
test say "this never happens".

So yes, I think you can design on the assumption that
paragraph-starter macros are never used as spacers.

In case it isn't obvious, I'm bashing a lot of stuff into tables
because doing this gets rid of lots of weird single-use macros and .TP
abuses that are used to get vertical-stacking effects.  groff_mm.man
was only the most egregious example.

This wouldn't have been a good direction to go until as late as two or
three years ago -- before then, lots of viewers (like, say, manServer
or older versions of man2html) tended to drop tables on the floor.
Nowdays things have turned completely around and tables are actually
less likely to make a modern viewer like yelp or kdehelp go crazy than
the abuses of list markup that they replace.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>