[Numpy-discussion] numpydoc - latex longtables error

[Skipper Seabold]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 3:28 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I think this one might be for Pauli.
>
> I've run into an odd problem that seems to be an interaction of
> numpydoc and autosummary and large classes.
>
> In summary, large classes and numpydoc lead to large tables of class
> methods, and there seems to be an error in the creation of the large
> tables in latex.
>
> Specifically, if I run 'make latexpdf' with the attached minimal
> sphinx setup, I get a pdflatex error ending thus:
>
> ...
> l.118 \begin{longtable}{LL}
>
> and this is because longtable does not accept LL as an argument, but
> needs '|l|l|' (bar - el - bar - el - bar).
>
> I see in sphinx.writers.latex.py, around line 657, that sphinx knows
> about this in general, and long tables in standard ReST work fine with
> the el-bar arguments passed to longtable.
>
>        if self.table.colspec:
>            self.body.append(self.table.colspec)
>        else:
>            if self.table.has_problematic:
>                colwidth = 0.95 / self.table.colcount
>                colspec = ('p{%.3f\\linewidth}|' % colwidth) * \
>                          self.table.colcount
>                self.body.append('{|' + colspec + '}\n')
>            elif self.table.longtable:
>                self.body.append('{|' + ('l|' * self.table.colcount) + '}\n')
>            else:
>                self.body.append('{|' + ('L|' * self.table.colcount) + '}\n')
>
> However, using numpydoc and autosummary (see the conf.py file), what
> seems to happen is that, when we reach the self.table.colspec test at
> the beginning of the snippet above, 'self.table.colspec' is defined:
>
> In [1]: self.table.colspec
> Out[1]: '{LL}\n'
>
> and thus the LL gets written as the arg to longtable:
>
> \begin{longtable}{LL}
>
> and the pdf build breaks.
>
> I'm using the numpydoc out of the current numpy source tree.
>
> At that point I wasn't sure how to proceed with debugging.  Can you
> give any hints?
>

It's not a proper fix, but our workaround is to edit the Makefile for
latex (and latexpdf) to

https://github.com/statsmodels/statsmodels/blob/master/scikits/statsmodels/docs/Makefile#L94
https://github.com/statsmodels/statsmodels/blob/master/scikits/statsmodels/docs/make.bat#L121

to call the script to replace the longtable arguments

https://github.com/statsmodels/statsmodels/blob/master/scikits/statsmodels/docs/fix_longtable.py

The workaround itself probably isn't optimal, and I'd be happy to hear
of a proper fix.

Cheers,

Skipper