Re: Documentation - chapter 52, system catalogs

=?UTF-8?Q?J=c3=bcrgen_Purtz?= <juergen(at)purtz(dot)de> writes:
> The attached patch contains:
> - for "System Catalog": moving paragraphs from bottom of 51. to top of
> 51.1. (in PG 11 it is chapter 52); explanation that "System Catalog" is
> a synonym for a concrete schema and its tables.
> - for "Information Schema": moving paragraphs from bottom of 36. to
> middle of 36.1. ; an explanation that it relies on the system catalog;
> change the title of 36.1. to "Overview" in correlation with "System
> Catalog".

I don't like this patch much; it seems to me that from a semantic
standpoint, it's making things worse not better. Text that's ahead
of the first <sect1> is more important than the text after it,
or should be.

I don't deny that we have a problem here: in the website rendering,
that text tends to be pushed down out of sight by the chapter's
sub-table-of-contents. But that issue exists for every chapter
that's got more than a couple of sections. We shouldn't hack
around it for just these two chapters. Chapter 9 and Appendix F
are additional examples where this is a fairly urgent issue.

I wonder if we should just drop the sub-table-of-contents material.
(I'm assuming DocBook can be coerced to do that; but since the PDF
output has no such material, it seems like it ought to be possible.)

Or ... is there a way to postpone it to the bottom of the page,
ie just before the first <sect1>, instead of having it in front
of the chapter preface?

The same issue exists for the sub-sub-tables-of-contents for <sect1>s,
though it's less bad because few of those have grown enormous lists
of <sect2>'s.

regards, tom lane