How to include publishing notes in Sphinx documentation?

Question

I would like to include a link to our publishing notes in the footer of Spinx html outout, next to the Copyright notice.

I tried to include a link in the copyright notice in conf.py. However, that is not rendered as expected. I tried several formats for the link and none worked so far.
```
copyright = '2023, Foo. Also see `PUBLISHING NOTES <https://www.foo.de/en/publishing-notes.html>`_'
```

There does not seem to be an extra Sphinx option for the publishing notes.

=> What is the recommended way to include publishing notes in the (html output of) Sphinx documentation?

=> Or asked in a more general way: how can I adapt the html footer that contains the copyright notice (and that is shown below each content page)?

Edit:

I also tried

html_theme_options = {
    'footer': '<a href="https://www.foo.de/en/publishing-notes.html">PUBLISHING NOTES</a>'
}

without luck.

Related:

https://github.com/readthedocs/sphinx_rtd_theme/issues/1490

Stefan · Accepted Answer · 2023-08-03T09:15:46.223

a) With sphinx_rtd_theme

Create a file _templates/footer.html inside the sphinx source folder with following content:

{% extends "!footer.html" %}
{% block extrafooter %}
    <p><a href="https://www.foo.de/en/publishing-notes.html">PUBLISHING NOTES</a></p>
    {{ super() }}
{% endblock %}

Reference the theme and _templates directory in conf.py:

html_theme = 'sphinx_rtd_theme'
templates_path = ['_templates']

Also see https://github.com/readthedocs/sphinx_rtd_theme/issues/349

b) Without sphinx_rtd_theme

See following related SO question on how to override the default layout:

How can I add a custom footer to Sphinx documentation?

_templates/layout.html:

{% extends '!layout.html' %}

{% block footer %}
        <!-- your html code here -->
{% endblock %}

That layout will probably not be applied if you specify an explicit theme. With an explicit theme use some theme specific options like shown in a)

How to include publishing notes in Sphinx documentation?

1 Answers1