Trailing blank lines can be introduced into verbatim environments in a number of ways. Transcluded text files may have trailing blank lines, for example, and authors often put a newline before the closing tag of an environment.

This can produce spurious looking listings in the documentation. If trailing newlines aren’t significant, setting $verbatim-trim-trailing-blank-lines will cause the stylesheets to trim blank (that is, entirely empty) lines from the end of verbatim environments.