Too many empty lines around code

[alkisg]

For the LTSP5 package, we switched our manpage sources from .xml to .md and we started using go-md2man. After Debian Buster was released and its man pages went online, we noticed a problem.

The man pages generated by go-md2man display fine when viewed under man. But when distributions use mandoc to publish them as .html pages online, a lot of empty lines are included in the html output, around the markdown code blocks (and I think elsewhere too).

As an example, see our lts.conf man page, as produced by go-md2man and then published by Debian's mandoc:
https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/ltsp-server/lts.conf.5.en.html

Search for the following line, and see how many empty lines are around it:
FSTAB_1="server:/home /home nfs defaults,nolock 0 0"

Our previous lts.conf manpage, that wasn't using go-md2man, displays a lot less empty lines:
https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/ltsp-docs/lts.conf.5.en.html

Ronn also manages to convert our new markdown-based man pages without extra empty lines, so I believe it's an issue with go-md2man. Thanks!

[alkisg]

I'm attaching a screenshot that demonstrates the problem better. It's divided in 4 parts:

normal man output	ronn html output
go-md2man with mandoc	ronn man output with mandoc

As you can see, the tops ones only have one empty line and are pretty, go-md2man with mandoc has 3 empty lines, and ronn man with mandoc has 2 empty lines.

[cpuguy83]

Looking a few things today, I see where we are producing some extra paragraph tags for section headers. Wonder if that's the problem here.

Anyway, if you can provide some source material I can check.

[alkisg]

Hello, due to this issue we switched our build scripts to prefer ronn if available, so the only example that I can provide is this old one:

Source: https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ltsp-upstream/ltsp/ltsp/view/head:/server/man/lts.conf.5.md
Result: https://manpages.debian.org/lts.conf

Thank you very much for your work in this!

[alkisg]

I tested go-md2man 2.0.0+ds-5 from Ubuntu 22.04, along with the gnome "yelp" program as a quick alternative to mandoc.

The following input:

```shell
a shell command
```

produced the following output:

.PP
.RS

.nf
a shell command

.fi
.RE

With that output, yelp displays one extra line. If I manually remove the blank line before .fi, the extra line is removed. I'm not sure if that's the same issue that mandoc has or not.

Btw, I still need to run sed -e 's/\\~/~/g;s/\\_/_/g' -i md2man.output to fix the tildes and underscores; I thought #26 had fixed that...

Thank you!

[kolyshkin]

Btw, I still need to run sed -e 's/\\~/~/g;s/\\_/_/g' -i md2man.output to fix the tildes and underscores; I thought #26 had fixed that...

This is off-topic for the issue at hand, and yet:

1. Tildes were fixed by PR Remove escaping tilde character #56.
2. Underscores (and some more characters) were fixed by PR Do not escape dash, underscore, and ampersand #74.

The following input:

```shell
a shell command

produced the following output:

.PP
.RS

.nf
a shell command

.fi
.RE

Since PR #95, this has changed to

.EX
a shell command

.EE

Meaning, there is still an extra newline.

[cpuguy83]

I think this should fix it: #113