On Monday, October 24, 2016 at 7:02:11 PM UTC-4, Dan Stromberg wrote: > On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 2:39 PM, Ned Batchelder <n...@nedbatchelder.com> > wrote: > > On Monday, October 24, 2016 at 5:00:47 PM UTC-4, Dan Stromberg wrote: > > >> However, we aren't really a PEP8 shop; we use hard tabs expanded to 4 > >> columns, and we use 120 columns total width (and sometimes a little > >> more :). > > >> Is there any good way of making Sphinx use 4 column tabs and 120 column > >> text? > > > Are you sure your tabs are being changed to eight spaces? It's possible they > > are still tabs in the browser, and the browser is choosing to display them > > as eight spaces. If that's the case, you can change the width using CSS in > > the theme. Likely the page width of 80 characters is also manipulable with > > CSS. > > It turned out CSS was the answer. I fixed it with: > > echo 'pre {tab-size: 4;width: 80em;}' > doc/_build/html/_static/custom.css > echo 'div.document {width: 100em; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: > 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px;}' >> > doc/_build/html/_static/custom.css > > Though it remains to be seen if it'll look as good in other people's > browsers. It bothers me that 120 columns of text fit so easily into > 80em. I thought 80em would be the width of 80 character cells... It > seems like a fixed pitch font, but maybe it's really proportionate. > Using 120em was huge.
An em is a unit as wide as the font size. So with 12-point text, an em is 12 points wide. Most characters are much narrower than that. The unit is called "em" because it's roughly the width of a capital M in a proportional font. Your monospace font would have 80 characters in 80em if the characters were all square, but they are not. Much more common is a character width of about .6em. Typography has a long history spanning multiple technologies, and close connections with people and how they read, so it isn't always obvious, though I personally find it fascinating. --Ned. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list