This is a list of Frequently Asked Questions about Sphinx. Feel free to suggest new entries!
For many more extensions and other contributed stuff, see the sphinx-contrib repository.
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 %}
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 http://code.google.com/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.
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).
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:
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)))))
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:
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,_,_
"""}