On 08/05/2026 21:41, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
[adding Stephen, Alejandro, and Chet to CC]
Hi Pádraig,
At 2026-05-08T20:17:32+0100, Pádraig Brady wrote:
This is useful in many man pages like date , dd, od, tr, ...
where there are tables presented, where extraneous lines
between each entry are best avoided.
groff man(7) has discouraged use of the `PD` macro since groff 1.20
(2009). In groff 1.23, it started warning of the macro's deprecation
when the `CHECKSTYLE` feature is used.[1]
Fair enough.
.PD 0 seems more functional rather than cosmetic,
so I would have avoided deprecating 0 as a special case.
I propose two new macros for groff man(7), `LS` and `LE`, to mark the
beginning and ends of lists. These would:
A. map more straightforwardly to HTML `dl`, `ol`, and `ul` elements;
B. be nestable;
C. accept an optional argument to request that the list be rendered
"compactly", meaning without inter-paragraph distance _between
items_.
Yes this higher level construct makes sense,
especially as it's used so often,
and maps to other formats more easily.
Compat is the main consideration for me.
I.e. we can use .PD 0 everywhere now.
We can adjust to LS/LE when available,
I suppose through a help2man option.
In general on compat if all man page consumers
like mandoc etc. support it, it seems like a good idea.
cheers,
Padraig
