theme overwrites pygments_style variable

[mwiesenberger]

I cannot use the flag pygments_style when using the sphinx-book-theme. Here is a minimal example

# conf.py

extensions = ['myst_parser']
html_theme='sphinx_book_theme'
pygments_style='default' # has no effect

index.md

Run

sphinx-build -M html . _sphinx

yields (which does not look good imo) the output code highlighting should look like which is generated with

# conf.py

extensions = ['myst_parser']
#html_theme='sphinx_book_theme'
pygments_style='default' # has no effect

I use

sphinx-build 5.0.2
sphinx-book-theme 1.0.1

Thanks for any help on how to fix this

Matthias

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[kennysong]

Our team has run into the same issue.

[mwiesenberger]

After some more research, I finally stumbled across the answer to the problem:
From this page in the documentation https://sphinx-book-theme.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference.html it is mentioned that pydata options are available as well. After some searching on their website one finds https://pydata-sphinx-theme.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_guide/styling.html#configure-pygments-theme at the end it says The native Sphinx option pygments_style will be overwritten by this theme. This explains why the above example does not work as expected.

The correct setting in conf.py seems to be

# conf.py

html_theme_options = {
   ...
   "pygment_light_style": "default",
   "pygment_dark_style": "monokai"
}

Considering how long it took me to find a solution to this problem I would suggest that the sphinx-book-theme documentation at least copies the danger warning about overwriting the pygments_style option and possibly explains how one is supposed to set the pygments style in the configuration.