Change the width of the sidebar.

[bpindelski]

This should help avoid situations where the sidebar overflows above the main text:

[bpindelski]

/cc @mtbc, @pwalczysko, @hflynn, @rleigh-dundee, @gusferguson

This change will need a consensus between all involved and with an opinion.
It's a fact that we're using the sphinxdoc theme that doesn't have support for arbitrary positioning of the sidebar (see http://sphinx-doc.org/theming.html#builtin-themes). Other themes support such a change. What we are trying to do with the positioning of the sidebar on the left is hacking around the limitation of the current theme.

I see a few solutions here, that will help us avoid spending ages on a convoluted CSS file:

• change the theme from sphinxdoc to something more flexible (see the link, there are a few to pick from),
• hardcode the width of the sidebar to 300px and hope that the TOC in the sidebar won't have words overflowing (like in the LDAP example); relying on user screen resolution statistics (e.g. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp) a resolution of the viewport in the range of 320x240px is rather unlikely,
• go back to the initial floating sidebar (i.e. revert Fix overflow issues with plonematch.css. #12 and close this PR).

I'm happy with any option.

[mtbc]

Floating seemed good to me, to be honest, but let's see how this looks.

[sbesson]

My 2p about @bpindelski's comment:

• solution 1 seem unreasonable in the context of 5.0.3 release and more generally of 5.0.x. If we want to go towards this route, I would be inclined to doing so on the develop branch for 5.1.0,
• no strong preference between solutions 2 and 3,
• arguably, the problem raised by this issue could also be solved at the content level. In the example above, should we not fix the chaindePasswordProvider* subheadings to have something more readable and adapted to the sidebar?

[bpindelski]

@sbesson I can open a PR that changes the headings to shorter words. In such a case, do we want to revert to a floating layout?

[sbesson]

To support Blazej's proposal, below are screeshots of three typical pages from our documentation:

• using the current live layout (i.e. pre Fix overflow issues with plonematch.css. #12)
  
  
  
• using solution 2 (300px harcoding)
  
  
  
• using solution 3 (floating layout)
  
  
  

Also /cc'ing @qidane who was involved in the desgin of the CSS theme.

[ghost]

Hard to tell from the screenshots alone since it doesn't show what happens when you make the window smaller (e.g. reduce width by 50%). I'd suggest that 300px hardcoding is bad; on high dpi displays that's less than 1 inch, so could be <10 characters wide. Some tablets are now >350dpi, so pixels as a length specifier are not portable.

[bpindelski]

@rleigh-dundee, @sbesson, @pwalczysko - as a compromise I've created a branch (https://github.com/bpindelski/sphinx_theme/tree/overflow2), where the layout is floating, but the "Note" and "Warning" boxes don't escape the flow of the text. See below screenshot:

[pwalczysko]

Option 3, with the compromise solution as described above in #13 (comment) seems like the best option to me.

[bpindelski]

@manics and @joshmoore complained that the sidebar is too wide, so I'll now push the changes from https://github.com/bpindelski/sphinx_theme/tree/overflow2 to this PR.

[manics]

A general comment: The font-size of the sidebar text looks to be larger than that of the main docs, and with it's new position on the left I think it's too prominent. One option would be to reduce the font-size, which might also help with some of the width/formatting issues.

[bpindelski]

@manics I will not be changing anything but the layout of elements in this PR, sorry. Lets finish this first and then we can have subsequent PRs with other modifications. I any other case this will grow exponentially, as everyone will have a comment.

[qidane]

If changing font sizes be careful how you do it. If set to a fixed size it will mess up the layout for people like me who have their browser set to use larger fonts. A relative size change would work better.

[bpindelski]

@sbesson I've done push -f. The two commits are the consensus version which @pwalczysko liked.

[sbesson]

See https://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/support/omero5-staging/index.html for the live deployment of 3fbe331

[manics]

Looks much better, thanks.

[sbesson]

Thanks, @rleigh-dundee @pwalczysko thoughts?

[pwalczysko]

https://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/support/omero5-staging/index.html looks very good.

[sbesson]

Assuming the last layout satisfied most of the people, merging this PR. New features/improvements can be carried out in separate ones. Thanks @bpindelski and all for the feedback.

[joshmoore]

Chrome/Mac shows weird behavior for https://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/support/omero5-staging/sysadmins/unix/server-postgresql.html:

[bpindelski]

@joshmoore, @sbesson See #15.