title: Bullet Lists after Paragraph in Python Docstring sometimes don't work with sphinx and numpydoc
body: <p>Documenting a Python module using the <a href="https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/doc/HOWTO_DOCUMENT.rst.txt" rel="nofollow noreferrer">numpy</a> style and generating html documentation using <a href="http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">sphinx</a> and the <a href="https://github.com/numpy/numpydoc" rel="nofollow noreferrer">numpydoc</a> extension, I stumbled upon a bug (or feature?) regarding bulleted lists.</p>
  <pre><code>In reStructuredText (and sphinx/numpydoc), a single-lined paragraph
      - with an immediately following
      - bullet list
      - is allowed,
  
  but if you have a &quot;long&quot; paragraph,
  which may be spanning several lines,
      - a following bullet list
      - results in an `ERROR: Unexpected indentation`.
  
  With a blank line added between the &quot;long&quot; paragraph, which again
  may span multiple lines, and the following list,
  
      - bullet lists
      - work fine again.
  </code></pre>
  <p>According to the <a href="http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html#bullet-lists" rel="nofollow noreferrer">reStructuredText reference</a>, bullet lists require an empty line before and after them.</p>
  <p><strong>Therefore I'd like to know:</strong> Why does the fist version work (while it shouldn't), and what is so different to the (not working) second version?</p>
  <hr />
  <h3>Edit:</h3>
  <p>In generated html the first and the last version differ in appearance. If the look of the bullet list <em>without</em> a leading empty line is desired (less space in html), a quickfix could be</p>
  <pre><code>to escape every line break by a backslash.\
  This way there's effectively only a single long line,
      - which allows bullet lists
      - even after long paragraphs.
  </code></pre>
  <p>This avoids the parsing error, but still does not answer the question of <em>why</em>  :-)</p>