Switch to pydata-sphinx-theme

[timhoffm]

Current status:

• We vendor our own sphinx theme that is based on an ancient verson of the alabaster theme. which has been heavily modified over time. The theme is a bit hard to maintain, and things can fall apart if sphinx does some changes (indeed we recently had a broken search Fix sphinx search #19279).
• The current layout is not responsive.
• Parts of the current layout look dated (which is subjective of course).

Proposal:

Reuse https://github.com/pydata/pydata-sphinx-theme, which has been adopted by some major numfocus projects.

I anticipate less maintainance effort on our side, because the theme is shared between multiple major projects.

I like the idea that major numfocus projects have similar but still distinct designs. One should recognize that numpy and matplotlib are related, but I still want to immediately see if I'm on numpy, pandas or matplotlib docs.
This needs som customization in terms of fonts, color, etc., Ideally make these things configurable options upstream in pydata-sphinx-theme so that we can just set it in conf.py and the theme does the rest.

This will also need some disentangling of the current mpl.css for keeping parts we still need in a same or similar form (e.g. gallery layout, version box, ...).

[jklymak]

If its responsive, then 👍 👍 👍 I do prefer our color scheme to the numpy one, which seems a bit bare-bones. But I won't complain...

[story645]

I like what the bokeh site is doing & think that might be a good inspiration for incorporating mpl.colors. https://docs.bokeh.org/en/dev/

I'm definitely +1 on something phone friendly

[rajpratyush]

@timhoffm I want to work on this issue. I would like to sort the disentangling of current mpl.css while someone else can do the customization of conf.py in collaboration or if you guide me I can even do it

[jklymak]

I would guess they have to be done together? Eat bet is to just give it a try and see what breaks. I wouldn't spend a lot of time polishing it until there is consensus that it's a good idea. So even if it is 75% good that would really help us know what's involved.

[rajpratyush]

I can do it but I would need some guidance on it @jklymak

[jklymak]

Follow the instructions, build the website and see what it looks like? Beyond that, I'd have to figure it out just like you would.

[rajpratyush]

sureee

[rajpratyush]

@jklymak well I edited the conf.py how to view the website ?

[jklymak]

Please read https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/devel/documenting_mpl.html I'd make sure you can build the website as-is before I changed conf.py.

[tacaswell]

I have started to take a pass at this, will try to push what I have gotten done later tonight. It breaks a lot of things :)

[tacaswell]

#19731 @rajpratyush Can you get the branch in that PR to build locally?

[rajpratyush]

@tacaswell I have got the dependencies and set up the dev environment but i don't have a latex system yet.

no I don't have access to the branch locally

if you provide me access to this branch, then only I can and then I can go through it and edit the css file which is causing the site to break it.