That's right, Velocity is strictly space-preserving, as I mentioned above:
if you have whitespace, it's preserved by default, because you might be outputting into plain text (not just plain-text email but any old text file) where CRs are critical for proper formatting.
So there isn't actually such a thing as an "unused" line -- a trailing CR is as important as any other CR.
If you want whitespace in your code for readability, it can help to use #define blocks instead of direct output.
For example:
#define( $output )
This
has
line
breaks
before
and
after
#end
${output.toString().trim()}
The, er, defining of the #define doesn't output anything. Output is managed by String-ifying the #define and then trim()-ing it first. So the final email wouldn't have the before and after linebreaks.
See also https://nation.marketo.com/community/product_and_support/blog/2018/09/22/in-velocity-tokens-trim-you...
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