[Numpy-discussion] numpydoc - latex longtables error

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 5:03 PM,  <josef.pktd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 6:17 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Skipper Seabold <jsseabold at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> Thanks - yes - I found your workaround in my explorations, I put in a
>> version in our tree too:
>>
>> https://github.com/matthew-brett/nipy/blob/latex_build_fixes/tools/fix_longtable.py
>>
>>  - but I agree it seems much better to get to the root cause.
>
> When I tried to figure this out, I never found out why the correct
> sphinx longtable code path never gets reached, or which code
> (numpydoc, autosummary or sphinx) is filling in the colspec.

No - it looked hard to debug.  I established that it required numpydoc
and autosummary to be enabled.

See you,

Matthew