Miscellaneous markup

File-wide metadata

reST has the concept of “field lists”; these are a sequence of fields marked up like this:

:fieldname: Field content

A field list near the top of a file is parsed by docutils as the “docinfo” which is normally used to record the author, date of publication and other metadata. In Sphinx, a field list preceding any other markup is moved from the docinfo to the Sphinx environment as document metadata and is not displayed in the output; a field list appearing after the document title will be part of the docinfo as normal and will be displayed in the output.

At the moment, these metadata fields are recognized:

tocdepth

The maximum depth for a table of contents of this file.

New in version 0.4.

nocomments

If set, the web application won’t display a comment form for a page generated from this source file.

orphan

If set, warnings about this file not being included in any toctree will be suppressed.

New in version 1.0.

Meta-information markup

.. sectionauthor:: name <email>

Identifies the author of the current section. The argument should include the author’s name such that it can be used for presentation and email address. The domain name portion of the address should be lower case. Example:

.. sectionauthor:: Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org>

By default, this markup isn’t reflected in the output in any way (it helps keep track of contributions), but you can set the configuration value show_authors to True to make them produce a paragraph in the output.

.. codeauthor:: name <email>

The codeauthor directive, which can appear multiple times, names the authors of the described code, just like sectionauthor names the author(s) of a piece of documentation. It too only produces output if the show_authors configuration value is True.

Index-generating markup

Sphinx automatically creates index entries from all object descriptions (like functions, classes or attributes) like discussed in Sphinx Domains.

However, there is also explicit markup available, to make the index more comprehensive and enable index entries in documents where information is not mainly contained in information units, such as the language reference.

.. index:: <entries>

This directive contains one or more index entries. Each entry consists of a type and a value, separated by a colon.

For example:

.. index::
   single: execution; context
   module: __main__
   module: sys
   triple: module; search; path

The execution context
---------------------

...

This directive contains five entries, which will be converted to entries in the generated index which link to the exact location of the index statement (or, in case of offline media, the corresponding page number).

Since index directives generate cross-reference targets at their location in the source, it makes sense to put them before the thing they refer to – e.g. a heading, as in the example above.

The possible entry types are:

single

Creates a single index entry. Can be made a subentry by separating the subentry text with a semicolon (this notation is also used below to describe what entries are created).

pair

pair: loop; statement is a shortcut that creates two index entries, namely loop; statement and statement; loop.

triple

Likewise, triple: module; search; path is a shortcut that creates three index entries, which are module; search path, search; path, module and path; module search.

see

see: entry; other creates an index entry that refers from entry to other.

seealso

Like see, but inserts “see also” instead of “see”.

module, keyword, operator, object, exception, statement, builtin

These all create two index entries. For example, module: hashlib creates the entries module; hashlib and hashlib; module. (These are Python-specific and therefore deprecated.)

You can mark up “main” index entries by prefixing them with an exclamation mark. The references to “main” entries are emphasized in the generated index. For example, if two pages contain

.. index:: Python

and one page contains

.. index:: ! Python

then the backlink to the latter page is emphasized among the three backlinks.

For index directives containing only “single” entries, there is a shorthand notation:

.. index:: BNF, grammar, syntax, notation

This creates four index entries.

Changed in version 1.1: Added see and seealso types, as well as marking main entries.

:index:

While the index directive is a block-level markup and links to the beginning of the next paragraph, there is also a corresponding role that sets the link target directly where it is used.

The content of the role can be a simple phrase, which is then kept in the text and used as an index entry. It can also be a combination of text and index entry, styled like with explicit targets of cross-references. In that case, the “target” part can be a full entry as described for the directive above. For example:

This is a normal reST :index:`paragraph` that contains several
:index:`index entries <pair: index; entry>`.

New in version 1.1.

Including content based on tags

.. only:: <expression>

Include the content of the directive only if the expression is true. The expression should consist of tags, like this:

.. only:: html and draft

Undefined tags are false, defined tags (via the -t command-line option or within conf.py, see here) are true. Boolean expressions, also using parentheses (like html and (latex or draft)) are supported.

The format and the name of the current builder (html, latex or text) are always set as a tag [1]. To make the distinction between format and name explicit, they are also added with the prefix format_ and builder_, e.g. the epub builder defines the tags html, epub, format_html and builder_epub.

These standard tags are set after the configuration file is read, so they are not available there.

New in version 0.6.

Changed in version 1.2: Added the name of the builder and the prefixes.

Tables

Use standard reStructuredText tables. They work fine in HTML output, however there are some gotchas when using tables in LaTeX: the column width is hard to determine correctly automatically. For this reason, the following directive exists:

.. tabularcolumns:: column spec

This directive gives a “column spec” for the next table occurring in the source file. The spec is the second argument to the LaTeX tabulary package’s environment (which Sphinx uses to translate tables). It can have values like

|l|l|l|

which means three left-adjusted, nonbreaking columns. For columns with longer text that should automatically be broken, use either the standard p{width} construct, or tabulary’s automatic specifiers:

L	flush left column with automatic width
R	flush right column with automatic width
C	centered column with automatic width
J	justified column with automatic width

The automatic width is determined by rendering the content in the table, and scaling them according to their share of the total width.

By default, Sphinx uses a table layout with L for every column.

New in version 0.3.

Warning

Tables that contain list-like elements such as object descriptions, blockquotes or any kind of lists cannot be set out of the box with tabulary. They are therefore set with the standard LaTeX tabular environment if you don’t give a tabularcolumns directive. If you do, the table will be set with tabulary, but you must use the p{width} construct for the columns that contain these elements.

Literal blocks do not work with tabulary at all, so tables containing a literal block are always set with tabular. Also, the verbatim environment used for literal blocks only works in p{width} columns, which means that by default, Sphinx generates such column specs for such tables. Use the tabularcolumns directive to get finer control over such tables.

Footnotes

[1]	For most builders name and format are the same. At the moment only builders derived from the html builder distinguish between the builder format and the builder name.