[Docutils-users] Problem with definition list

[Greg W. <gw...@me...>]

I'm trying to document a collection of methods like this:

"""
Common widget methods
---------------------

The Widget base class also provides a couple of useful
methods:

``set_name(name : string)``
  use this to change the widget name supplied to the constructor.
  Unless you know what you're doing, you should do this before
  rendering or parsing the widget.

``set_value(value : any)``
  use this to set the widget value; this is the same as supplying
  a value to the constructor (and the same type rules apply, ie.
  the type of 'value' depends on the widget class).

``clear()``
  clear the widget's current value.  Equivalent to
  ``widget.set_value(None)``.
"""

but Docutils doesn't seem to like my notation for argument types:

Reporter: WARNING (2) Inline literal start-string without end-string at line 10.
Reporter: WARNING (2) Inline literal start-string without end-string at line 15.

If I remove the whitespace around the colons, it doesn't complain.  

Oh... bugger... I seem to have run afoul of the "classifier" feature of
definition lists.  (Have I mentioned how nice it is that reST has a
semi-formal spec?)  This would be only slightly annoying if it weren't
for the fact that that feature appears to have been at least vaguely
inspired by the type syntax that I invented for Grouch.  That raises it
from "slightly annoying" to "richly ironic", I think.

So is there a way to work around that feature?  I tried backslashing the
colons, and they just came out backslashed in the HTML output.

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                gw...@me...
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