Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at> writes:
> On Thu, 2026-10-08 at 12:41 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Not in the least. Those, and every other &zwsp; in the SGML docs,
>> are there so that the PDF version renders without complaints about
>> overlength lines.
> Ugh. I should have put some effort into research before claiming
> it is a mistake.
> But I doubt if is is smart to break copy and paste from the HTML
> documentation to avoid warnings in the PDF build. I for one regularly
> copy and paste stuff from the HTML documentation, and I have seen and
> built the PDF documentation for the first time today (before writing
> this). I doubt I am the only one. Are these warnings a big problem?
Well, we could ignore those warnings if we chose, but that is not
without cost. In a lot of these places the line would run through
the right margin and completely off the visible page area, making
the text physically unreadable in PDF form. I judge that to be a
bigger problem for consumers of that documentation format than
"I can't cut and paste this example" is for users of the HTML
format.
Now there's certainly a discussion to be had about how many people
still use the PDF output and whether we should just dump it
entirely. But short of doing that, I don't think we can drop our
concern for line length in PDF output.
I still wonder whether there's another solution path though.
We settled on &zwsp; because it fixed the major issue here,
but that doesn't mean there isn't a better answer.
regards, tom lane
