Re: [Groff] Re: UTP paragraph spacing

[Meg McRoberts]

--- Steve Izma <address@hidden> wrote:
 
> A paragraph plus whitespace is deemed by almost all publishers
> with style guidelines to be unnecessary. In some respect it's
> ambiguous: does it represent a "greater" separation of thought
> than a normal paragraph? Don't forget that most readers are used
> to reading paragraphs without extra separation and they bring
> such assumptions with them to everything they read.

Yes, this is the traditional standard, I agree, and it works well
for books that are mostly running text broken into paragraphs.
But it seems to me that the technical community is using the block
paragraphs more often -- I just grabbed a couple O'Reilly books to
confirm that, the Linux/UNIX manpages and most of the standard
Linux documentation are using the block paragraphs.

At issue is how visually jagged the right margin of text is on the
page.  The indented "example" text is not as visually distinct on
a page where the paragraphs are also indented.
 
> If you feel like the paragraphs look too crowded, then I suggest
> you probably prefer more leading to lighten up the page, so we
> should add more space between the lines.

I actually like very heavy pages of text personally -- the white space
is not the issue.  But when the page includes a lot of indented example
material (our .Ps) that has a space preceding it, it seems good if the
paragraphs also have the space.

meg


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes
http://autos.yahoo.com