0010-a-change-marker-standing-alone-is-furniture.md

0010. A change marker standing alone on a line is furniture

• Status: Accepted
• Date: 2026-08-22

Context

The three PG&E schedules print a bracketed capital beside a filing change, (R) revised, (N) new, (I) increase, (D) decrease, (L) line change only, (T) transferred -- the letters California's General Order 96-B defines -- and a change bar in the right margin beside a whole changed paragraph, which pdfplumber extracts as the literal character |. Both are visible today, inside notes, wherever the line they sit beside is not otherwise understood, e.g. "BASELINE RATES: PG&E may require the customer to complete and file with it a (L)".

Where a marker sits at the end of an otherwise real line, sheet_rates.py already reads through it (MARGIN_TOKEN_RE, unconditionally, for any single bracketed capital): the row's own amount is what is emitted, and the marker is stripped from the row's own value area without altering the citation's snippet, which still quotes the line as printed. That was already correct and untouched by this decision.

What was not handled is a line carrying nothing else at all: pdfplumber extracts a change bar spanning several rows as its own line, at its own vertical position, and a marker beside a heading with no priced row of its own the same way. Such a line is not content in any sense the rest of this parser tries to structure -- it names no fact, prices nothing, states no eligibility -- and today it is reported as an unrecognised content line and carried into notes as the bare string "(D)" or "|", which is not useful to a reader and drags down a coverage figure over content that was never there.

Stripping the marker from a real line's quotation, so that notes reads "...file with it a" instead, was rejected: that edits a quotation, which this parser does not do anywhere else, and the roadmap said so before this ADR existed. The question this ADR answers is only about a line that is the marker, nothing else.

Decision

Reading a bare marker line as furniture, the same category as a running header or footer (Line.furniture, already excluded from the coverage denominator and from every recognizer's input), is the fix. It fits the category exactly: Page furniture is not content, per extract.py's own docstring for that flag.

Which letters a publisher uses this way is a filing convention the page does not state, the same shape of fact supersession_word already supplies. A new profile field, change_markers: frozenset[str], names them; the default is empty, so an unprofiled document treats no line this way. pge-tariff-book names the six letters actually observed across the three schedules it was written from: {"R", "N", "I", "D", "L", "T"}. The change bar, |, is not itself letter-specific -- it is the same right margin glyph as the bracketed letters, just for a whole paragraph rather than one line -- so it counts as soon as a profile names any letter at all, rather than needing a field of its own.

A line only qualifies when it carries exactly one word and that word is one of these two forms. A marker sharing a line with anything else, however short, is left exactly as it is today: still inside whatever citation quotes that line, verbatim.

Consequences

• pge-e-1's coverage moves from 42/269 (15.6%) to 42/247 (17.0%); 22 lines were entirely a bare marker or a change bar. pge-e-tou-c moves from 18/425 (4.2%) to 18/346 (5.2%), 79 such lines. pge-b-1 moves from 106/507 (20.9%) to 104/477 (21.8%); 2 of the lines reclassified as furniture here had previously been swept in as spurious trailing "continuation" text of a numbered item by an unrelated recognizer (a bug this change also incidentally closed, since the swept line no longer exists in content_lines for that recognizer to reach). No emitted price changes anywhere: this only ever removes a line that priced nothing.
• The four SMUD schedules take the empty default for change_markers, the same as every other profile field, and their golden output is byte for byte unchanged.
• What each letter means -- revised versus new versus a wording change with no rate change -- is still not read. A reader who needs to know whether a given price changed, rather than merely that a line beside it once carried a flag now excluded as furniture, still has to consult the publisher's own filing.