man(7): .TP: Change minimum distance between tag and paragraph from 1 to 2 (subjective)

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Branden,

I had this discussion today:

Tagged paragraphs leave a minimum of a single space betweeen the tag and the 
paragraph.  In some cases, where the tag can be continuated in the same line by 
the paragraph as a sentence, it feels a bit confusing, and feels like there's a 
missing line break.


0123   foo bar baz

01234  foo bar baz

012345 foo bar baz

0123456
       foo bar baz


I've had this feeling myself in the past, and in fact, I designed the use of 
lists in the Linux man-pages to avoid that as much as possible, by leaving 
always 2 spaces betweed a bullet list and the text[1].

I suggest a breaking change to groff_man(7), where the minimum (default) 
separation between the tag and the paragraph is 2.  I also suggest adding a 
register (or I couldn't find it) to tweak that amount.


0123   foo bar baz

01234  foo bar baz

012345
       foo bar baz

0123456
       foo bar baz


Does this make sense to you?  It's a breaking change, but it's just cosmetic.  I 
hope people won't scream too much about it.

Cheers,

Alex

[1]:

man-pages(7):
   Lists
       There are different kinds of lists:

       [...]

       There should always be exactly 2 spaces between the list symbol
       and the elements.  This doesn’t apply to  "tagged  paragraphs",
       which use the default indentation rules.

See also:

<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/man7/man-pages.7#n623>
<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/?id=4279e42dd98a11b31fa4e1fcebbb00b7a677bb70>
<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/?id=22356d97e388c79993c94d43109087d3c8740187>
<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/?id=48fea6deb5057a9cd8ebefb73682aa077e629c94>


--
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

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