sphinx-redline

Experimental — not yet recommended for real documentation projects. Commenting works end to end on GitHub and on a local GitLab, and can be tried out on a fork, but this is an early alpha release: its settings and comment file format may still change. See the roadmap.

A Sphinx extension for Word-style review comments on your documentation. Readers highlight text in the built HTML and leave a comment; each comment is anchored to the RST/Markdown source file and line and follows its text as the source changes. Comments are stored as files in git and saved through your git forge (GitHub or GitLab), so no extra service is needed.

Documentation: https://patrickerich.github.io/sphinx-redline/ — including an example comment and a tutorial to try it on your own fork.

Install

pip install sphinx-redline

Then add "sphinx_redline" to extensions in conf.py; the setup guide covers where comments are stored and how readers sign in.

Quick start (development)

source ./sourceme.sh   # creates .venv (python3.13 by default) and installs requirements.txt
make test              # run the test suite
make docs              # build docs/source into docs/build/html (warnings are errors)
make docs-preview      # live-reload authoring server on http://localhost:8000
make help              # all targets

Use another interpreter (3.12 or newer) with PYTHON=python3.12 source ./sourceme.sh. This only takes effect when .venv does not exist yet; delete it to switch.

License

Apache License 2.0. The software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind; use it at your own risk. See sections 7 (Disclaimer of Warranty) and 8 (Limitation of Liability) of the license.