Re: [Docutils-users] Inline, verbatim anchors?

[Guenter M. <mi...@us...>]

On 2019-10-07, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> On 07/10/2019 14.11, Guenter Milde via Docutils-users wrote:
>> On 2019-10-07, Matthew Woehlke wrote:

>>> What I want, ideally, is a role that takes its text and generates an
>>> anchor from its text (i.e. sets the 'id' on its node to its contents),
>>> *and also emits the text*.

>> You may be looking for `inline internal targets`__.

>> __ http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html#inline-internal-targets

> Huh. Okay, that *sort of* works, but is there any way to style the text?

Unfortunately, inline markup nesting is not supported.
This is a long standing feature request.
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/dev/todo.html#nested-inline-markup

> Also, the replacement of '.' with '-' is undesired and doesn't seem to
> be necessary...

The replacement is done in the ID, but not in the text or the "name" used
for references to this target from other places in the rST document:

   This is the _`inline.target`
   
   I can link to it with `inline.target`_ in the rST source document.
   
   Other documents link to it as ``file:foo.html#inline-target``
   

The rationale was to make the ID compatible with both, HTML4.1 and CSS1
identifiers:
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#rationale

There is a feature request to lift these limitations
https://sourceforge.net/p/docutils/feature-requests/66/
but we have to think about backwards compatibility
(it would be a bad thing if re-compiling a document would break external
links to it adapted to the current transformation without advance warning)
and other output formats (LaTeX, manpage, ODT).

Günter