reST has the concept of “field lists”; these are a sequence of fields marked up like this:
:Field name: Field content
A field list at the very top of a file is parsed as the “docinfo”, which in normal documents can be used to record the author, date of publication and other metadata. In Sphinx, the docinfo is used as metadata, too, but not displayed in the output.
At the moment, these metadata fields are recognized:
The maximum depth for a table of contents of this file.
New in version 0.4.
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.
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) are true. Boolean expressions, also using parentheses (like html and (latex or draft) are supported.
The format of the current builder (html, latex or text) is always set as a tag.
New in version 0.6.
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:
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 | ragged-left column with automatic width |
| R | ragged-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 literal blocks cannot be set with tabulary. They are therefore set with the standard LaTeX tabular environment. 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.