I just wanted to throw this in the archives; this doesn't need to affect your patch.
Because of how the new tables look in the PDF docs, I thought it might be a good time to research how to make each function-entry occupy two rows: one for prototype, return type and description, and the other for the example and its result. Below is a first cut of how you'd implement that idea -- see colspec/spanspec/spanname ... only the output looks almost as bad (though the benefit is that it doesn't overwrite cell contents anymore). I think we have two choices. One is to figure out how to make this work (ie. make it pretty; maybe by using alternate cell backgrounds, say one white and one very light gray; maybe by using thinner/thicker inter-cell lines); the other is to forget tables altogether and format the info in some completely different way. <table id="functions-binarystringconversions"> <title>Binary/String Conversion Functions</title> <tgroup cols="4"> <colspec colnum="1" colname="col1" colwidth="1*" /> <colspec colnum="2" colname="col2" colwidth="1*" /> <colspec colnum="3" colname="col3" colwidth="1*" /> <colspec colnum="4" colname="col4" colwidth="1*" /> <spanspec spanname="cols12" namest="col1" nameend="col2" /> <spanspec spanname="cols34" namest="col3" nameend="col4" /> <thead> <row> <entry spanname="cols12">Function</entry> <entry>Return Type</entry> <entry>Description</entry> </row> <row> <entry spanname="cols12">Example</entry> <entry spanname="cols34">Result</entry> </row> </thead> <tbody> <row> <entry spanname="cols12"> <indexterm> <primary>convert_from</primary> </indexterm> <literal><function>convert_from(<parameter>bytes</parameter> <type>bytea</type>, <parameter>src_encoding</parameter> <type>name</type>)</function></literal> </entry> <entry><type>text</type></entry> <entry> Convert binary string to the database encoding. The original encoding is specified by <parameter>src_encoding</parameter>. The <parameter>bytes</parameter> must be valid in this encoding. See <xref linkend="conversion-names"/> for available conversions. </entry> </row> <row> <entry spanname="cols12"><literal>convert_from('text_in_utf8', 'UTF8')</literal></entry> <entry spanname="cols34"><literal>text_in_utf8</literal> represented in the current database encoding</entry> </row> -- Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services