For a long time we have rejoiced that our HTML output from Sphinx is far better than what we got from the old DocBook toolchain. But it still leaves a lot to be desired; the following is an attempt to improve the situation somewhat. Sphinx has a theming mechanism for HTML rendering. Since the kernel's adoption of Sphinx, we have been using the "Read The Docs" theme — a choice made in a bit of a hurry to have *something* while figuring out the rest. RTD is OK, but it is not hugely attractive, requires the installation of an extra package, and does not observe all of the Sphinx configuration parameters. Among other things, that makes it hard to put reasonable contents into the left column in the HTML output. The Alabaster theme is the default for Sphinx installations, and is bundled with Sphinx itself. It has (IMO) nicer output and gives us the control that we need. So: switch to Alabaster. Additional patches adjust the documentation and remove the RTD references from scripts/sphinx-pre-install. The penultimate patch changes the way that kerneldoc declarations are rendered to (IMO) improve readability. That requires some changes to kernel-doc to output a new container block and some CSS tweaks to improve things overall. It should be noted that I have a long history of inflicting ugly web designs on the net; this work is a start, but I think we could do far better yet. It would be great if somebody who actually enjoys working with CSS and such would help to improve what we have. As before, I've put a copy of the rendered docs at: https://static.lwn.net/kerneldoc/ To compare the kerneldoc changes specifically, pick a page that includes a lot of definitions; for example: https://static.lwn.net/kerneldoc/driver-api/media/drivers/frontends.html vs. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/driver-api/media/drivers/frontends.html ------- Changes from the initial version: - Tweak more alabaster style parameters, including the maximum page width. There will surely be disagreement over what the right value should be, but at least it's defined in units independent of screen resolution. - Remove "classic" theme configuration and a bunch of other conf.py cruft. - I've tried to answer all of the other comments, but a couple remain. The sidebar contents are unchanged; making that more useful will require some thought and work. The gray background on function prototypes that Jani pointed out is actually something I did intentionally, with the idea of making each declaration stand out better in the wall of text. I still think it's better but am not married to it if the world disagrees. - I've tested PDF and epub builds (no changes) and Sphinx back to v1.7. In the absence of objections I'll be putting this into docs-next after the merge window closes. We can (and surely will) tweak this forever, but at least it, I hope, shows a direction in which we can go. Jonathan Corbet (6): docs: Switch the default HTML theme to alabaster docs: tweak some Alabaster style parameters docs: update sphinx.rst to reflect the default theme change docs: sphinx-pre-install: don't require the RTD theme docs: improve the HTML formatting of kerneldoc comments docs: decruft Documentation/conf.py Documentation/conf.py | 204 ++++--------------------- Documentation/doc-guide/sphinx.rst | 16 +- Documentation/sphinx-static/custom.css | 28 ++++ Documentation/sphinx/requirements.txt | 1 - scripts/kernel-doc | 52 ++++--- scripts/sphinx-pre-install | 8 - 6 files changed, 91 insertions(+), 218 deletions(-) create mode 100644 Documentation/sphinx-static/custom.css -- 2.37.2
