Re: How do I suppress "helpful" blank lines generated by makeinfo?

[Karl Berry]

Hi Alan,

    I hate being forced to do what somebody else thinks is the right
    thing to want to do.  :-)

For better or wrose, one of the whole design features of Texinfo from
the time rms and chassell invented it was to have almost no style
options.  There is no option for this.

    But in this particular case, this:

I can agree with you that the list is more readable without the blank
lines.
    
    The Texinfo manual agrees with this, almost (but not quite) stating
    that omitting a blank line before @item carries over to the Info file.

Yeah, that's a discrepancy.  I can speculate that the original
texinfo-format-buffer circa 1986 did not insert the blank lines.  But if
there was ever a time that makeinfo did not insert the blank lines, it
was many years ago.

The problem is that there are many manuals which sprinkle blank lines
around essentially at random wrt @item, and expect the right thing to
happen.  So following the source file's blank lines is not practical.

I could imagine an option like
@itemize @bullet squeeze
or doing it as a separate command,
@listspacing squeezed

Not crazy about the syntax in either case, but those are the ideas that
come to mind.  Semantically, it would explicitly say to omit the blank
lines (and less space in the TeX output, too).

k