Default templates not used?

[paravoid]

OK forgive me if this is a stupid question, as I may be missing something major in the new template functionality:

1. lowdown.1 says: "If not explicitly set with --template, a default template is produced as follows …"
2. But later on, under FILES, there is a list of files (under share/), with a description of "The default template used if --template is not provided to -t[…]"

I tried modifying the -tman template on the filesystem and no changes were made in the output.

Looking at the code, as far as I can tell nothing reads the templates under /usr/share/, and the default output is just generated in code e.g. bn = bqueue_block(st, obq, ".\\\" -*- mode: troff; coding: utf-8 -*-");.

I started looking at this trying to figure out whether I should ship the templates with the liblowdown2 package or the main lowdown package, but if it turns out I don't need to ship them at all, that would be even easier 😄

[kristapsdz]

Good point with misusing the term "default" on my part.

When lowdown is used without --template, it produces meaningful defaults, but it doesn't actually use the templates in share. I do this intentionally to avoid loading up files whenever lowdown is started. So the default is hard-coded. The files in share behave similarly, but aren't used by the system.

[anddam]

@kristapsdz does lowdown also strip down whitespaces when using hard-coded templates compared to files passed via --template?

I compared lowdown -s -thtml --template /usr/share/lowdown/html/default.html with lowdown -s -thtml and was surprised to see lot of tabs and spaces in the first output and not in the second.