Re: building pdfs

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
> On 07/26/2014 06:44 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
>>> Yes, I did that and generated a PDF, but I got an enormous number of
>>> errors or warnings. See
>>> <https://www.dropbox.com/s/9n4hhijin3qn8mw/postgres-US.log> for example.

>> If they're things like "overfull hbox" from the TeX step, they're
>> expected.

> That's rather sad. How would we find out that something has actually 
> gone wrong, short of it failing to write a PDF altogether? Searching 
> through 204,000 lines of output doesn't sound like fun.

I've always assumed that if there were something seriously wrong, it
*would* fail to generate a PDF.  It certainly does so when we hit
things like the link-crosses-a-page-boundary restriction.

> There are lots of these:
>     Package Fancyhdr Warning: \fancyhead's `E' option without twoside
>     option is use
>     less on input line 83877.

Well, if you'd like to do the work to figure out a way to suppress
that, more power to you.

> and quite a few overfull hboxes that are more than 72pt too wide.

I can't see that we'd ever invest the effort to get rid of those.

Personally I find the PDF docs to be an anachronism: surely nobody
is printing them on dead trees any more, and for on-computer usage,
what do they offer that the HTML format doesn't?  So I'm unexcited
about making them slightly prettier.
        regards, tom lane