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Embedding Content From Your Documentation, blog post
We have covered most of this feature in our guide at https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guides/embedding-content.html, so I don't think there is too much to add here. However, I think the blog is the right place to promote this feature and share a little of its story. I'd like to have an example of in-app UI tooltip, but the tool we built does not look nice and I don't think we want to promote that as is.
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.. post:: June 23, 2020 | ||
:tags: embed, sphinx, sphinx-extension, api | ||
:author: Manuel | ||
:location: BCN | ||
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.. meta:: | ||
:description lang=en: | ||
Read the Docs allows you to embed content from any of the projects we host. | ||
This allows reuse of content across sites, making sure the content is always up to date. | ||
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Embedding Content From Your Documentation | ||
========================================= | ||
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We are happy to announce we have built a solid Embed API. | ||
You can use it to embed content from any of the project we host, *anywhere*. | ||
The Embed API is a very simple but super powerful idea: | ||
*returns the content of a specific section from a particular document in a project*. | ||
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This functionality brought us the ability to work in two different projects: | ||
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:Contextualized tooltips on documentation pages: | ||
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We thought it would be awesome if we could add some extra context to a link within the same page. | ||
This would help the reader to understand in a better way the concept linked, | ||
without switching context and jumping into another completely different page, | ||
and maybe getting lost or distracted with lot of new content in the document opened. | ||
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We had the concept already highlighted by a link, | ||
we had the Embed API that could return the exact content of the referenced section... | ||
*Let's add a tooltip with this content when the reader hovers the link!* | ||
--and that's how `sphinx-hoverxref`_ was born. | ||
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``sphinx-hoverxref`` allows the author of the documentation to easily add these tooltips, | ||
customize their style, decide which elements will show tooltips and more! | ||
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.. figure:: /_static/sphinx-hoverxref-demo.gif | ||
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Example of ``sphinx-hoverxref`` on Read the Docs documentation. | ||
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.. _sphinx-hoverxref: https://sphinx-hoverxref.readthedocs.io/ | ||
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:Inline help on our application website: | ||
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Usually, we think that adding a text in the UI is not great and we are tempted to avoid it if possible. | ||
We try to reduce the words there and, in case the feature is big enough, add a link to the full documentation. | ||
This pattern has worked fine over time, but it has the same problem of context switching to a completely different page. | ||
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Since we've started working on a new re-design of our entire application UI (more on this coming soon!), | ||
we thought we could introduce the usage of the Embed API to add this extra documentation, | ||
with small links next to the feature we want to explain without overloading UI | ||
but giving the user the ability to have the exact contextualized paragraph for that particular feature. | ||
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If you liked the Embed API and the use cases we presented here, | ||
you can `read its full documentation`_ to learn more about it. | ||
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.. _read its full documentation: https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guides/embedding-content.html | ||
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We think it's a super powerful feature and we encourage you to use the extension we built on top of it, | ||
or even better, build your owns and share them with us! |