Sphinx Sections¶
Section headers are created by underlining (and optionally overlining) the section title with a punctuation character, at least as long as the text:
=================
This is a heading
=================
Normally, there are no heading levels assigned to certain characters as the structure is determined from the succession of headings. However, for the Python documentation, we use this convention:
#with overline, for parts*with overline, for chapters=, for sections-, for subsections^, for subsubsections", for paragraphs
Explicit Markup¶
“Explicit markup” is used in reST for most constructs that need special handling, such as footnotes, specially-highlighted paragraphs, comments, and generic directives.
An explicit markup block begins with a line starting with .. followed by
whitespace and is terminated by the next paragraph at the same level of
indentation. (There needs to be a blank line between explicit markup and normal
paragraphs. This may all sound a bit complicated, but it is intuitive enough
when you write it.)
Directives¶
A directive is a generic block of explicit markup. Besides roles, it is one of the extension mechanisms of reST, and Sphinx makes heavy use of it.
Basically, a directive consists of a name, arguments, options and content. (Keep this terminology in mind, it is used in the next chapter describing custom directives.) Looking at this example,
.. function:: foo(x)
foo(y, z)
:bar: no
Return a line of text input from the user.
function is the directive name. It is given two arguments here, the
remainder of the first line and the second line, as well as one option bar
(as you can see, options are given in the lines immediately following the
arguments and indicated by the colons).
The directive content follows after a blank line and is indented relative to the directive start.
Footnotes¶
For footnotes, use [#]_ to mark the footnote location, and add the footnote
body at the bottom of the document after a “Footnotes” rubric heading, like so:
Lorem ipsum [#]_ dolor sit amet ... [#]_
.. rubric:: Footnotes
.. [#] Text of the first footnote.
.. [#] Text of the second footnote.
You can also explicitly number the footnotes for better context.
Comments¶
Every explicit markup block which isn’t a valid markup construct (like the footnotes above) is regarded as a comment.
Source encoding¶
Since the easiest way to include special characters like em dashes or copyright signs in reST is to directly write them as Unicode characters, one has to specify an encoding:
All Python documentation source files must be in UTF-8 encoding, and the HTML documents written from them will be in that encoding as well.
Gotchas¶
There are some problems one commonly runs into while authoring reST documents:
Separation of inline markup: As said above, inline markup spans must be separated from the surrounding text by non-word characters, you have to use an escaped space to get around that.