Received: from malur.postgresql.org ([217.196.149.56]) by arkaria.postgresql.org with esmtps (TLS1.3:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.92) (envelope-from ) id 1jTWwP-0001sb-Q2 for pgsql-hackers@arkaria.postgresql.org; Tue, 28 Apr 2020 20:34:53 +0000 Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=malur.postgresql.org) by malur.postgresql.org with esmtp (Exim 4.92) (envelope-from ) id 1jTWwO-0005ze-Cl for pgsql-hackers@arkaria.postgresql.org; Tue, 28 Apr 2020 20:34:52 +0000 Received: from magus.postgresql.org ([2a02:c0:301:0:ffff::29]) by malur.postgresql.org with esmtps (TLS1.3:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.92) (envelope-from ) id 1jTWwO-0005zX-5W for pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org; Tue, 28 Apr 2020 20:34:52 +0000 Received: from sss.pgh.pa.us ([66.207.139.130]) by magus.postgresql.org with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.92) (envelope-from ) id 1jTWwH-0005wd-Gc for pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org; Tue, 28 Apr 2020 20:34:51 +0000 Received: from sss1.sss.pgh.pa.us (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by sss.pgh.pa.us (8.14.4/8.14.4) with ESMTP id 03SKYaZV022803; Tue, 28 Apr 2020 16:34:36 -0400 From: Tom Lane To: Peter Eisentraut cc: "Jonathan S. Katz" , Bruce Momjian , Alvaro Herrera , Robert Haas , Steven Pousty , Pavel Stehule , Isaac Morland , Pierre Giraud , PostgreSQL Developers Subject: Re: Poll: are people okay with function/operator table redesign? In-reply-to: <5561.1587922854@sss.pgh.pa.us> References: <20200423174343.GA16996@alvherre.pgsql> <19233.1587665407@sss.pgh.pa.us> <5561.1587922854@sss.pgh.pa.us> Comments: In-reply-to Tom Lane message dated "Sun, 26 Apr 2020 13:40:54 -0400" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <22801.1588106076.1@sss.pgh.pa.us> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2020 16:34:36 -0400 Message-ID: <22802.1588106076@sss.pgh.pa.us> List-Id: List-Help: List-Subscribe: List-Post: List-Owner: List-Archive: Precedence: bulk I wrote: > One thing I couldn't help noticing while fooling with this is what > seems to be a bug in the PDF toolchain: any place you try to put > an , you get extra whitespace. Not a lot, but once you > see it, you can't un-see it. It's particularly obvious if one of > two adjacent lines has the extra indentation and the other doesn't. > ... > The only "fix" I've found is to place the at the end > of the signature instead of the beginning. I spent some more time experimenting with this today, and determined that there's no way to fix it by messing with FO layout attributes. The basic problem seems to be that if you write ceiling ceiling ( numeric ) then what you get in the .fo file is ceiling ( numeric ) where the apparently is used as a cross-reference anchor. The trouble with this is that the rules for collapsing adjacent whitespace don't work across the , so no matter what you do you will end up with two spaces not one before the visible text "ceiling". The only way to hide the effects of that with layout attributes is to set whitespace to be ignored altogether within the block, which is quite undesirable. The fix I'm currently considering is to eliminate the extra whitespace run(s) by formatting s within tables this way: char_length character string length length of a character string character string, length char_length ( text ) integer Perhaps it's only worth being anal about this in table cells with multiple function signatures and/or multiple s; in other places the whitespace variation just isn't that noticeable. On the other hand, there's something to be said for having uniform layout of the XML source, which'd suggest having a uniform rule "no whitespace before an within a table cell". Or we could put the s at the end. Or just ignore it, reasoning that the PDF output is never going to look all that great anyway. Thoughts? regards, tom lane