note meta <metanote.t...@gmail.com> writes: > 3. About Pre-blank > > The first blank line in a Greater Element is parsed as a paragraph. > However, this behavior is inconsistent in Items and Footnote definitions. > In Items and Footnote definitions, a blank line is parsed as a Pre-blank. > In Footnote definitions, especially, this blank line appears only once > because having more than one would break the Footnote definitions. > > #+begin_example > [fn:a] > > bbb > #+end_example
Not just items and footnotes, but also headings. AFAIK, the original motivations to separate :pre-blank from contents was to avoid problems during export to LaTeX, where blank lines can sometimes break document structure because blank lines serve as paragraph separators. In practice, it does not matter much though - ox-latex cleans up blank lines in paragraphs. The only place where :pre-blank is actually utilized is headings. That said, removing :pre-blank will be a breaking change in the parser. And I do not see any clear practical benefit dropping it. So, we should probably leave the current idiosyncrasy for items, footnote-definitions, and headlines as is. -- Ihor Radchenko // yantar92, Org mode contributor, Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>. Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>, or support my work at <https://liberapay.com/yantar92>