I need a way to escape from Sphinx’s limitation that HTML output contains one and only one page per level-1 heading. For the sake of readability, some of my document’s content must be divided into pages at a lower heading level.
I’m considering whether I can do this by manipulating the table of contents in the left sidebar, as follows.
Suppose I have a document with this structure:
Little section
A subsection
Another subsection
Big section
Level 2 in a big section
Another level 2 in a big section
Another little section
Normally the document would have three pages beginning with the headings “Little section,” “Big section,” and “Another little section.” But I want two additional pages, beginning with the headings “Level 2 in a big section” and “Level 2 in another big section.” I would do this as follows.
Put each level-2 section in a separate reST file, which makes its initial heading a level-1 heading from Sphinx’s point of view.
Add the :orphan: option to each “level 2” reST file so that it doesn’t appear in the sidebar TOC automatically.
Manually add level-2 entries to the sidebar TOC under “Big section” which have the text “Level 2 in a big section” and “Another level 2 in a big section,” and link to the orphaned “level 2” files.
I’m asking whether this is possible because I saw the following statement on sphinx-doc.org Directives page. I have put the relevant part in italics:
You can also give a “hidden” option to the [toctree] directive, like
this:
.. toctree::
:hidden:
doc_1
doc_2
This will still notify Sphinx of the document hierarchy, but not
insert links into the document at the location of the directive –
this makes sense if you intend to insert these links yourself, in a different style, or in the HTML sidebar.
This appears to say: Yes, what I propose is possible. But I can’t find a clue to how it’s done. Can anyone provide insight?
Related
I want to write a documentation page where I have something like:
Title
*****
Introductory text
Subsection with more details
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Details
Section 1
=========
Section 2
=========
Unfortunately, this only renders Subsection with more details as the main section, with all subsequent ones being the subsections. From my research, it seems to happen because Sphinx doesn't have a fixed hierarchy for headings and instead it just interprets
the document structure to decide on what the sections are, based on their succession (as seen at https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/basics.html).
I have also tried using upper markup to titles, to force section hierarchy, but that doesn't seem to work either.
Is there a not too invasive way of doing this? This page is for an open source project with lot of documentation pages already, not all following the same markup standards, and I'm afraid that if I tried to somehow define in our settings what each section/subsection marker should look like, we would have a lot of formatting headache ahead of us... (or I would, hehe)
=========
Section 1
=========
Thanks in advance!
I have a lot of ASCII docs at different locations and I want to create an index page which should render these documents. But the condition here is that I want to list all the document link on the index page and if the user clicks on any link then only the document should be displayed. I don't want to display the documents below the table of content. I just want to display the table of content on the index page.
Is there any way to do this?
If I understand you correctly, you wish to generate a multi-document website, but you want an index page that displays just the TOC, with the other documents served elsewhere. I believe the best way to get this effect would be to generate chunked XHTML output using the DocBook toolchain. I believe this should be possible with Asciidoctor tools, but I have only implemented this particular post-rendering toolchain with the original (Python-based) AsciiDoc rendering tool, as documented here. This setup is configurable to generate a TOC index page that links to chunked output (you can configure the level of chunking).
As you have already figured out, AsciiDoc's automated TOC generation only works on the present document, which requires including the subordinate document to get their headings for the TOC. I can think of ways to sort of game this, such as to include just the heading of the included document (include::path/to/document.adoc[lines=1]) and then hiding even those headings with CSS or something. The problem is, the links in the TOC will be pointing internally, so you'd need to handle that somehow.
Another way is to use any of the static-site generators that support or can be readily extended to support AsciiDoc. What you're talking about is not an out-of-the-box feature that I'm aware of, but they all at least make it possible to generate an organized TOC-type navigation.
We are considering using Sphinx where I work and it appears to do everything we need. However, I am having issues getting it to match the required corporate template, which requires there to be some front matter pages inserted between the title page and table of contents.
If text is text is placed above the master table of contents in the .rst file, then it is placed above the TOC in the HTML output, but it is moved to below the TOC in the pdf output. I've also tried adding a hidden toc, but that didn't work either. The content also gets placed after the non-hidden toc.
.. toctree::
:hidden:
frontmatter
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 2
contents_of_document
I know this has to be possible since people have published books using this tool, but I can't figure out how to do it.
I've tried this with sphinx 1.4.0 and 1.4.1. Is this something I need to add a latex sty or cls file to make it work? I would prefer not to since we would like to use both the HTML and PDF outputs.
Thanks
It looks like I need to RTFM. It is in chapter 10 to of the sphinx manual:
’tableofcontents’ “tableofcontents” call, default ’\tableofcontents’. Override if you want to generate a different table of contents or put content between the title page and the TOC.
So it order to do this, you need to learn some LaTeX as you will have to manually (or programmatically) write the from matter separately from the reST documentation.
I have a Restructured Text document which several hierarchical sections, such as:
Main title
##########
Text under the main title.
Sub-section
===========
Text under the sub-section.
This works great, I get the correct HTML formatting when I compile it using Sphinx.
My question is: how can I go up a hierarchy level so I can add more text after a few sub-sections?
For example:
Main title
##########
Text under the main title.
Sub-section
===========
Text under the sub-section.
In my CSS, sub-section is indented.
I want this paragraph to be rendered as part of the Main title section,
not the sub-section.
I'm basically looking for a way to go up a level in the hierarchy.
Is this possible?
Thanks!
It's not possible to go "up" the hierarchy without starting a new section at the level you desire. Document section structure doesn't work that way. Changes in section level must be preceded by corresponding section titles. Using indentation to signal a section-like structure should only be used in a limited local scope.
What you're describing isn't a subsection, it's a topic. Docutils has a directive for that:
.. topic:: title
Topic text.
May include multiple body elements (paragraphs, lists, etc.).
There is also a "sidebar" directive for a similar structure, but typically for a parallel topic that's off to the side. The "rubric" directive may also be of interest.
See http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html for details.
there are tutorials on the web about gow to create index.html, css file and template.xml that contain placeholders. ok, i got it, it's simple. but i need a template that has some different views. for example:
-all pages have a topmenu, header, left sidebar, mainarea and a footer but:
-first page has no header .topmenu after which sidebar, mainarea and footer comes.
-second page has sidebar moved from left to right
-third page has four blocks (blocks for special offers) instead of mainarea.
as far as i can see, i need to create three standalone templates with unique set of placeholders for each template. because i can't see the way to change laarge mainarea placeholder with four placeholders for offers blocks on some pages. dynamically.
is there if-statements in joomla templates to simply determine a document id to view four placeholders instead of mainarea. or to not show header on the main page (f.e. doc. id="mainpage")
but i want it to be selectable like:
-this page has first case of that template (index_1.php)
-and that page has a second case of the same template (index_2.php)
like a selectbox.
is that possible?
I will make this an answer as opposed to a comment since I believe it will do what you are looking for.
Once your articles are setup and your links to them are established (the site has the info on it you're looking for), you can create the modules containing the data that you want shown from time to time.
Go to the module manager - on the right you should see 'module assignment' or something along the lines of 'display this module on the following pages'; you can then pick which pages you want the module to show on. You can specify all pages, none, specific pages, however you want.
This will enable you to show them only where needed however you like.
You can ALSO do this programatically inside the module (if you do custom HTML and use an extension like Sourcerer to add PHP to the module) with PHP should you want a little more flexibility, but just choosing the pages to show on should work for what you're doing.