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Postings from October 1999
>Gurusamy Sarathy <gsar@ActiveState.com> wrote
>> They do make a difference when you have verbatim text that
>> contains a line with nothing but whitespace. They make the
>> entire thing one block of verbatim text rather than two.
>That's a tad subtle for me. Sure, internally they'll be handled
>differently. But since it's *verbatim*, what comes out of the
>processing should be identical. Except for the trailing spaces
>on the blank line, of course. But who notices them? :-)
No, it's different. Watch:
% cat -tev /tmp/a.pod
=pod$
$
This bit here is followed by $
a non-blank line that contains blanks.$
$
And then goes on to new stuff.$
% pod2man --lax /tmp/a.pod
[elisions]
.PP
.Vb 4
\& This bit here is followed by
\& a non-blank line that contains blanks.
\&
\& And then goes on to new stuff.
.Ve
Now compare this with very similar file:
% cat -tev /tmp/b.pod
=pod$
$
This bit here is followed by $
a truly blank line that contains no blanks.$
$
And then goes on to new stuff.$
% pod2man --lax /tmp/b.pod
.PP
[elisions]
.Vb 2
\& This bit here is followed by
\& a truly blank line that contains no blanks.
.Ve
.Vb 1
\& And then goes on to new stuff.
.Ve
What's the difference? Let's look at the Vb and Ve macros:
.de Vb
.ft CW
.nf
.ne \\$1
..
and also
.de Ve
.ft R
.fi
..
So the big differce here is that you have two .ne(ed) request instead
of one. That can affect what page the different portions of the code
falls on. Usually, though, you're happy to keep code paragraphs together,
not groups of the them.
--tom
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