Sphinx: Multiple footnotes render as multiple tables

[shimizukawa]

Input

#!rst

Bla bla [#]_ and blah [#]_

.. [#] first
.. [#] second

Output

#!html
<p>Bla bla <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id9" id="id7">[4]</a> and blah <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id10" id="id8">[5]</a></p>
<table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id9" rules="none">
<colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup>
<tbody valign="top">
<tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id7">[4]</a></td><td>first</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id10" rules="none">
<colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup>
<tbody valign="top">
<tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id8">[5]</a></td><td>second</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>

---

• Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/issue/1567
• Originally reported by: PJK
• Originally created at: 2014-09-16T23:01:19.123

[shimizukawa]

_From Takayuki Shimizukawa on 2014-09-23 03:44:38+00:00_

Thanks for reporting.

Let me clarify, do you think it should be rendered by one table with 2 rows?

[shimizukawa]

_From PJK on 2014-09-25 18:50:33+00:00_

I'd expect the output to be something along the lines of

#!html

<p>Bla bla <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id9" id="id7">[4]</a> and blah <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id10" id="id8">[5]</a></p>

<table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id9" rules="none">
<colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup>
<tbody valign="top">
<tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id7">[4]</a></td><td>first</td></tr>
<tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id8">[5]</a></td><td>second</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>

So yes, one table with two rows. Is the current behaviour intentional?

[shimizukawa]

_From Takayuki Shimizukawa on 2014-09-26 13:37:59+00:00_

PJK yes, it's intentional behavior. It is implemented at docutils (super layer of sphinx). If we want to merge them into one table, we need to re-implement a part of docutils html4css1 writer by sphinx side.

Pull request, patch, suggestion are always welcome ;)

[shimizukawa]

_From PJK on 2014-09-26 13:56:19+00:00_

Great, thanks for explaining that. http://repo.or.cz/w/docutils.git/blob/HEAD:/docutils/docutils/writers/html4css1/__init__.py#l944 seems to be the problem. I'll report this in docutils' tracker

[Paebbels]

Is there any progress at docutils regarding this issue?

I consider this a bug, because

• there is no sense to create a table for only one line.
• having more then 10 footnotes will cause a miss-alignment of columns

Moreover, it's questionable why it creates tables, because the tables are used for styling and not for data presentation.

This is an example, generated by sphinx + docutils: One HTML table per footnote

This is the result after manually correcting the HTML source file:

[Blendify]

any news here?

[tk0miya]

No updates. We have tons of issues now. So we could not work only for this. if you want to fix this earlier, please send us pull request. We're always welcome your PR :-)