Weird sidebar index behavior

[remram44]

I can't pretend to know what the intended behavior is, but it's probably not that:

Clicking on the plus "+" next to "Contributing to Open Source Projects" moves the other items under that one and turns everything white.

[jhermann]

According to http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/rest.html#sections the document title should probably use '*', or else the section hierarchy start with '-' and not '='.

[bitprophet]

Thanks for the report! That is pretty wacky looking.

I think this is a bug in the sidebar templates for the sphinx_rtd_theme which is what my doc host ReadTheDocs defaults to.

When I build the docs locally and force either default (old Sphinx 1.2- default) or empty theme (which uses Alabaster, the new actual default in Sphinx 1.3+), the resulting bullet nav lists look pretty normal. And the overall header levels are also pretty normal & identical to what I use everywhere else (and I've been Sphinxing for a long time).

Poking at the theme a bit, I think this is one of two things:

• The JS & styling is making incorrect assumptions because of the one-page nature of the site; it should probably just not be including that topmost page element, or if it is, indent the rest & skip the 'expando' plus sign.
• The HTML for the ToC changed sometime in core Sphinx (the theme doesn't generate that snippet, it comes from Sphinx itself) and the theme is out of date somehow.

I don't have a ton of time to dig into this and it's relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. Open to suggestions but I suspect this is gonna require a patch to the theme and not this project. Alternately, I might just change my conf file to render in Alabaster (new Sphinx default...also a theme I own) and call it a day.

Input accepted :)

[bitprophet]

YEARS LATER...

This is somehow still buggy even under Sphinx 5.x and sphinx-rtd-theme 1.2.0! 😖

I doublechecked jhermann's assertion about the headers, but as I thought, the characters used are purely convention - Sphinx doesn't actually care. (I'd been writing Sphinx documents for years before I made this site and the header style I use has always worked fine before, and as noted in 2016, worked in other themes.)

I don't have additional time for this now but if I did, I would be trying to 'bisect' the document by nuking parts of it to see if there's a specific element messing everything up or something. Or copy in the sample documentation from the theme's own docs (its header layout is pretty basic too though).