html - sphinx, restructuredtext: set color for a single word

Question

Is there a way to set the color of single words (or characters) in sphinx? I'm pretty sure there should be some markup tag, like HTML's font tag.

Answer 1

On my Sphinx-powered website, I use a combination of:

• A restructuredText file containing roles definitions, one for each color - see .special.rst (BitBucket link)
• A CSS file containing color rules for each role - see the first lines of hacks.css (BitBucket link)

Then, in every rST file where I need colors, I first import .special.rst at the top, either manually:

.. include:: .special.rst

Or with the rst_epilog configuration variable in Sphinx's conf.py file:

rst_epilog = "
.. include:: .special.rst
"

And then each role can be used easily in pure rST syntax:

This is :red:`red !` And :blue:`this part is blue`.

More details are given on this page (in French, sorry).

It works perfectly well for html output (and html-like), but not for PDF. Refer to the first answer above for producing a PDF with colors.