Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2020 19:18:18 -0300
From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Alexander Lakhin <exclusion@gmail.com>, pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Getting our tables to render better in PDF output
Message-ID: <20200212221818.GA15503@alvherre.pgsql>
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On 2020-Feb-12, Tom Lane wrote:

> With a separate argument-types cell it'd likely be
> better to just leave the cell empty, but do we want to write
> just "→ rettype" in a signature cell?

Yeah, it'd look very odd, and certainly the no-parens case makes it
worse.  I like this end result:

> so being consistent with that might suggest including the function name
> in function signatures:
> 
>     Function               Signature
> 
>     age                    age(timestamp) → interval
> 
>     now                    now() → timestamp with time zone
> 
>     current_timestamp      current_timestamp → timestamp with time zone
> 
> I'm a bit suspicious of how much horizontal space that would eat, but
> if we're able to get rid of the separate cell for result type, it
> might work out OK.

Regarding no-parens function signatures, perhaps we can add a footnote
indicating that such functions have this strange shape because of the
SQL committee, such as "&dagger; This function signature uses no
parentheses because the SQL standard defines it in that way."

-- 
Álvaro Herrera                https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services