pgsql: Doc: introduce new layout for tables of functions and operators. - Mailing list pgsql-committers

Doc: introduce new layout for tables of functions and operators.

We've long fought with the draconian space limitations of our
traditional table layout for describing SQL functions and operators.
This commit introduces a new approach, though so far I've only applied
it to a few of those tables.  The new way makes use of DocBook's support
for different layouts in different rows of a table, and allows the
descriptions and examples for a function or operator to run to several
lines without as much ugliness and wasted space as before.

The core layout concept is now

     Name              Signature
                      Description
                 Example     Example Result

so that a function or operator really has three table rows not one,
but we group them to look like one row by having the name column
have only one entry for all three rows.  (Actually, there could be
four or more rows if you wanted to have more than one example, which
is another thing that was painful before but works easily now.)
This is handled by a "morerows" annotation on the name entry, which
isn't perfect (notably, the toolchain is not smart enough to avoid
breaking these row groups across PDF pages) but there seems no better
solution in DocBook.  The name column is normally fairly narrow,
allowing plenty of space for the other column(s), and not wasting too
much space when one of the other components runs to multiple lines.

The varying row layout is managed by defining named "spans" and then
tagging entries with a "spanname" of "name", "sig", "desc", "example",
or "exresult".  This provides a bit of semantic annotation to go with
the formatting improvement, which seems like a good thing.  (It seems
that we have to re-define these spans afresh for each table, which is
annoying, but it's not any worse than the duplication involved in
the table headers.  At least that gives us an opportunity to vary the
relative column widths per-table, which is handy since function tables
sometimes need much wider name columns than operator tables.)

Signature entries should be written in the style
    <function>fname</function>(<type>typename</type> ...)
    <returnvalue>typename</returnvalue>
The <returnvalue> tag produces a right arrow before the result type
name.  (I'll document that convention in a user-visible place later.)

While this provides significantly more horizontal space than before
for examples, it's still true that PDF output is a lot narrower than
typical webpage viewing windows, so some examples need to be broken
in places where there is no whitespace.  I've added &zwsp; markers in
suitable places to allow the tables to render warning-free in PDF.

I've so far converted only the date/time operator, date/time function,
and enum function tables in sections 9.9 and 9.10; these were chosen
to provide a reasonable sample of the formatting problems that need
to be solved.  Assuming that this looks good on the website and doesn't
provoke howls of anguish, I'll work on the other similar tables in the
near future.

There's a moderate amount of new editorial content in this patch along
with the raw formatting changes; for instance I had to write text
descriptions for operators that lacked them.  I failed to resist the
temptation to improve some other descriptions and examples, too.

Patch by me, with thanks to Alexander Lakhin for assistance with
figuring out some formatting issues.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/9326.1581457869@sss.pgh.pa.us

Branch
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master

Details
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https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/e894c61836e4b967f7ec65358fdaed2ba86ed238

Modified Files
--------------
doc/src/sgml/func.sgml             | 1028 ++++++++++++++++++++++++------------
doc/src/sgml/stylesheet-common.xsl |    6 +
doc/src/sgml/stylesheet-fo.xsl     |    7 +
3 files changed, 711 insertions(+), 330 deletions(-)