Sphinx (documentation tool): setting output tab width

Question

How do you set the tab width in the HTML output of the Sphinx code snippets highlighted by Pygments? By default it is annoying 8, but I want 4. I did not find a word about this setting in Sphinx conf.py.

Answer 1

You will need to write the Sphinx extension. Add your own Lexer and apply it using VisibleWhitespaceFilter .

Answer 2

Add something like this to conf.py:

import re def process_docstring(app, what, name, obj, options, lines): spaces_pat = re.compile(r"( {8})") ll = [] for l in lines: ll.append(spaces_pat.sub(" ",l)) lines[:] = ll def setup(app): app.connect('autodoc-process-docstring', process_docstring) 

See also the Sphinx Docstring preprocessing documentation.

Answer 3

I asked the same question about the sphinx-dev group and found out that this is a problem with Docutils, which is used by Sphinx. Docutils replaces all tabs with 8 spaces and there is currently no way to change this value from Sphinx.

http://groups.google.com/group/sphinx-dev/browse_thread/thread/35b8071ffe9a8feb

The only possible solution seems to be to follow the recommendations of S. Lott and John Powlet in the comments on my question - use spaces instead of tabs.