Friday, May 29, 2015

Some time ago I asked at the sphinx-users group: “The alabaster theme is very beautiful, but how can I get the previous | next | modules | index links that used to be in the upper right corner?”

Takayuki Shimizukawa answered: By my quick investigation, alabaster hide such navigation bar if browser width larger than 860px. You can change this behavior by using custom CSS.

Now I had a look at this and tried to change it.

In .templates/layout.html, under the line:

{% extends "!layout.html" %}

added the following line:

{% set css_files = css_files + ["_static/myalabaster.css"] %}

Then created a file .static/myalabaster.css with this content:

/* override alabaster setting */
div.document {
    width: 940px;
    margin: 30px auto 0 auto;
}

But after some fiddling and guessing, I abandoned! The most realistic way to get back my “previous” and “next” links into the upper margin is to switch to the class theme:

html_theme = "classic"
html_theme_options = dict(collapsiblesidebar=True, externalrefs=True)

Voilà. Grrr… enough time wasted on purely cosmetic things! To be serious, there is one concrete advantage of alabaster: it is more readable on a smartphone. But sorry, I am not going to ask from desktop users to resize their browser window in order to see the “previous” and “next” links.