Sphinx FAQ — Sphinx 1.4 documentation

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# Sphinx FAQ

This is a list of Frequently Asked Questions about Sphinx. Feel free to suggest new entries!

## How do I...

... create PDF files without LaTeX?
  You can use rst2pdf version 0.12 or greater which comes with built-in Sphinx integration. See the Available builders section for details.
... get section numbers?
  They are automatic in LaTeX output; for HTML, give a `:numbered:` option to the `toctree` directive where you want to start numbering.
... customize the look of the built HTML files?
  Use themes, see HTML theming support.
... add global substitutions or includes?
  Add them in the `rst_epilog` config value.
... display the whole TOC tree in the sidebar?
  Use the `toctree` callable in a custom layout template, probably in the `sidebartoc` block.
... write my own extension?
  See the extension tutorial.
... convert from my existing docs using MoinMoin markup?
  The easiest way is to convert to xhtml, then convert xhtml to reST. You’ll still need to mark up classes and such, but the headings and code examples come through cleanly.
... create HTML slides from Sphinx documents?
  See the “Hieroglyph” package at https://github.com/nyergler/hieroglyph.

For many more extensions and other contributed stuff, see the sphinx-contrib repository.

## Using Sphinx with...

Read the Docs
  https://readthedocs.org is a documentation hosting service based around Sphinx. They will host sphinx documentation, along with supporting a number of other features including version support, PDF generation, and more. The Getting Started guide is a good place to start.
Epydoc
  There’s a third-party extension providing an api role which refers to Epydoc’s API docs for a given identifier.
Doxygen
  Michael Jones is developing a reST/Sphinx bridge to doxygen called breathe.
SCons
  Glenn Hutchings has written a SCons build script to build Sphinx documentation; it is hosted here: https://bitbucket.org/zondo/sphinx-scons
PyPI
  Jannis Leidel wrote a setuptools command that automatically uploads Sphinx documentation to the PyPI package documentation area at http://pythonhosted.org/.
GitHub Pages
  Directories starting with underscores are ignored by default which breaks static files in Sphinx. GitHub’s preprocessor can be disabled to support Sphinx HTML output properly.
MediaWiki
  See https://bitbucket.org/kevindunn/sphinx-wiki/wiki/Home, a project by Kevin Dunn.
Google Analytics

  You can use a custom `layout.html` template, like this:

      {% extends "!layout.html" %}

      {%- block extrahead %}
      {{ super() }}
      <script type="text/javascript">
        var _gaq = _gaq || [];
        _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'XXX account number XXX']);
        _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
      </script>
      {% endblock %}

      {% block footer %}
      {{ super() }}
      <div class="footer">This page uses <a href="http://analytics.google.com/">
      Google Analytics</a> to collect statistics. You can disable it by blocking
      the JavaScript coming from www.google-analytics.com.
      <script type="text/javascript">
        (function() {
          var ga = document.createElement('script');
          ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ?
                    'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
          ga.setAttribute('async', 'true');
          document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(ga);
        })();
      </script>
      </div>
      {% endblock %}

## Epub info

The following list gives some hints for the creation of epub files:

- Split the text into several files. The longer the individual HTML files are, the longer it takes the ebook reader to render them. In extreme cases, the rendering can take up to one minute.

- Try to minimize the markup. This also pays in rendering time.

- For some readers you can use embedded or external fonts using the CSS `@font-face` directive. This is extremely useful for code listings which are often cut at the right margin. The default Courier font (or variant) is quite wide and you can only display up to 60 characters on a line. If you replace it with a narrower font, you can get more characters on a line. You may even use FontForge and create narrow variants of some free font. In my case I get up to 70 characters on a line.

  You may have to experiment a little until you get reasonable results.

- Test the created epubs. You can use several alternatives. The ones I am aware of are Epubcheck, Calibre, FBreader (although it does not render the CSS), and Bookworm. For bookworm you can download the source from https://code.google.com/archive/p/threepress and run your own local server.

- Large floating divs are not displayed properly. If they cover more than one page, the div is only shown on the first page. In that case you can copy the `epub.css` from the `sphinx/themes/epub/static/` directory to your local `_static/` directory and remove the float settings.

- Files that are inserted outside of the `toctree` directive must be manually included. This sometimes applies to appendixes, e.g. the glossary or the indices. You can add them with the `epub_post_files` option.

- The handling of the epub cover page differs from the reStructuredText procedure which automatically resolves image paths and puts the images into the `_images` directory. For the epub cover page put the image in the `html_static_path` directory and reference it with its full path in the `epub_cover` config option.

## Texinfo info

There are two main programs for reading Info files, `info` and GNU Emacs. The `info` program has less features but is available in most Unix environments and can be quickly accessed from the terminal. Emacs provides better font and color display and supports extensive customization (of course).

### Displaying Links

One noticeable problem you may encounter with the generated Info files is how references are displayed. If you read the source of an Info file, a reference to this section would look like:

    * note Displaying Links: target-id

In the stand-alone reader, `info`, references are displayed just as they appear in the source. Emacs, on the other-hand, will by default replace `*note:` with `see` and hide the `target-id`. For example:

> Displaying Links

The exact behavior of how Emacs displays references is dependent on the variable `Info-hide-note-references`. If set to the value of `hide`, Emacs will hide both the `*note:` part and the `target-id`. This is generally the best way to view Sphinx-based documents since they often make frequent use of links and do not take this limitation into account. However, changing this variable affects how all Info documents are displayed and most due take this behavior into account.

If you want Emacs to display Info files produced by Sphinx using the value `hide` for `Info-hide-note-references` and the default value for all other Info files, try adding the following Emacs Lisp code to your start-up file, `~/.emacs.d/init.el`.

    (defadvice info-insert-file-contents (after
                                          sphinx-info-insert-file-contents
                                          activate)
      "Hack to make `Info-hide-note-references' buffer-local and
    automatically set to `hide' iff it can be determined that this file
    was created from a Texinfo file generated by Docutils or Sphinx."
      (set (make-local-variable 'Info-hide-note-references)
           (default-value 'Info-hide-note-references))
      (save-excursion
        (save-restriction
          (widen) (goto-char (point-min))
          (when (re-search-forward
                 "^Generated by \\(Sphinx\\|Docutils\\)"
                 (save-excursion (search-forward "\x1f" nil t)) t)
            (set (make-local-variable 'Info-hide-note-references)
                 'hide)))))

### Notes

The following notes may be helpful if you want to create Texinfo files:

- Each section corresponds to a different `node` in the Info file.

- Colons (`:`) cannot be properly escaped in menu entries and xrefs. They will be replaced with semicolons (`;`).

- Links to external Info files can be created using the somewhat official URI scheme `info`. For example:

      info:Texinfo#makeinfo_options

  which produces:

  > info:Texinfo#makeinfo_options

- Inline markup

  The standard formatting for `*strong*` and `_emphasis_` can result in ambiguous output when used to markup parameter names and other values. Since this is a fairly common practice, the default formatting has been changed so that `emphasis` and `strong` are now displayed like ``literal'`s.

  The standard formatting can be re-enabled by adding the following to your `conf.py`:

      texinfo_elements = {'preamble': """
      @definfoenclose strong,*,*
      @definfoenclose emph,_,_
      """}