If a verbatim environment is processed with a syntax highlighter, the highlighter may remove leading blank lines. This option will produce that result for verbatim environments that are not syntax highlighted.

If leading blank lines aren’t significant, setting $verbatim-trim-leading-blank-lines will cause the stylesheets to trim blank (that is, entirely empty) lines from the beginning of verbatim environments.

(This parameter is false by default for backwards compatibility.)