According to the documentation for Pelican 4.8.0, I should be able to prevent the creation of certain pages by setting their value to an empty string.
I am the only author of my blog, and have set up a simple about me page, with more detail than the author page provides. Within the docs is this note:
If you do not want one or more of the default pages to be created (e.g., you are the only author on your site and thus do not need an Authors page), set the corresponding *_SAVE_AS setting to '' to prevent the relevant page from being generated.
Using this as my guidance, I've set the following values in my config file:
AUTHORS_SAVE_AS = ""
AUTHOR_SAVE_AS = ""
Unfortunately, both the overall authors.hml and individual author author/NewGuy.html are still being generated.
I am using Pelican 4.8.0
Is there a new/better way to prevent these pages from being generated? Sadly, the documentation doesn't appear to be 100% accurate in this case
Since the documented behavior is precisely what I observe (i.e., I can't replicate the behavior you describe), the most likely explanation is that those spurious files are left over from a previous generation run (before you set those two settings to empty strings). As noted in the Settings Documentation, the default behavior is to leave the output folder in place and generate files on top of it. If that is not your desired flow, you can set DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY = True as noted in the docs.
Either way, you can achieve the same effect manually on a one-time basis: I suggest removing your output folder entirely and re-generating your site, in order to ensure you are getting a completely fresh build.
The following steps are what I used to confirm that the documented behavior appears to be accurate:
# (Make new virtual environment)
python -m pip install pelican[markdown]
pelican-quickstart
# (Answer questions)
cd my-new-site
pelican
ls output | grep authors # authors.html printed in console
vim pelicanconf.py
# (Set above two settings to empty strings)
pelican
ls output | grep authors # authors.html is *not* printed in console