Matplotlib Sphinx Theme

This is the official Sphinx theme for Matplotlib documentation. It extends the pydata-sphinx-theme project, but adds custom styling and a navigation bar.

A demo of the theme built with the main branch can be seen at https://matplotlib.org/mpl-sphinx-theme/.

When creating a Matplotlib subproject you can include this theme by changing this line in your conf.py file

html_theme = 'mpl_sphinx_theme'

And by including mpl_sphinx_theme as a requirement in your documentation installation.

See the docs/conf.py file for other settings.

There are two main templates that replace the defaults in pydata-sphinx-theme:

navbar_center = mpl_nav_bar.html
navbar_end = mpl_icon_links.html

Note that the logo options need not be specified as they are included in theme initialization. The logo is stored at mpl_sphinx_theme/static/logo_{light,dark}.svg.

To change the top navbar, edit mpl_sphinx_theme/mpl_nav_bar.html

To change the social icons, edit mpl_sphinx_theme/mpl_icon_links.html

To change the style, edit mpl_sphinx_theme/static/css/style.css

Overriding hard coded elements

This theme is primarily designed to be used with subprojects that are part of the main Matplotlib webiste (e.g., [our cheatseets](https://github.com/matplotlib/cheatsheets] and [list of third-party packages](https://github.com/matplotlib/mpl-third-party)). As such several elements are hard coded. However, the theme may also be used by other subprojects that need to change the hard-coded defaults. The following sections explain how to reset these back to their defaults by modifying html_theme_options in conf.py.

Header section links

Use a copy of [the default pydata-sphinx-theme navbar](https://github.com/pydata/pydata-sphinx-theme/blob/main/src/pydata_sphinx_theme/theme/pydata_sphinx_theme/components/navbar-nav.html) and set the 'navbar_center' key to this HTML file in html_theme_options.

Building

To build the theme with a sample page, navigate into the doc/ directory and run

make html

The built html pages can be found in doc/_build/html/

Releasing

This project uses GitHub Actions to automatically push a new release to PyPI whenever a release is made.

For example, to release a new 3.9.0 version of mpl-sphinx-theme:

• be sure to edit mpl_sphinx_theme/_version.py
• checkout the commit you would like to release
• add a git tag
• push the tag to the matplotlib/mpl-sphinx-theme repository

$ git checkout <commit-hash>
$ git tag -s -a v3.9.0 -m 'REL: 3.9.0'
$ git push upstream --tags

Finally, turn the tag into a GitHub release.

Update the required mpl-sphinx-theme version in the following files:

• matplotlib/matplotlib: requirements/doc/doc-requirements.txt
• matplotlib/mpl-brochure-site: requirements.txt
• matplotlib/mpl-third-party: docs/requirements.txt
• matplotlib/governance: requirements-doc.txt
• matplotlib/mpl-gui: requirements-doc.txt