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Tables in docs make looking up functions unnecessarily hard #1728

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@typesanitizer

Description

@typesanitizer

Before anything else: I think xarray is awesome and I love using it! It has made my life so much simpler over juggling dictionaries of arrays and maintaining indices in my head. Thank you to all contributors 😄!

Problem description

I can't read the method tables all at once (i.e. method name + args + short description). This makes it unnecessarily hard to see which function is doing what. Here are some pictures using Firefox, with and without tree-style tabs, and on a larger monitor for the last one.

table_1
table_2
table_3

You have to scroll horizontally to read. This makes using a mouse terrible as the horizontal scrollbar is at the bottom of the table and not the bottom of the screen (the table is too big vertically to fit on the screen). The "hack" I'm using is to start selecting some text inside the table and drag the cursor to the edge leading to horizontal scrolling.

Suggestion

It would be nice if you didn't have tables but just inlined the short description like this one.

table_replace

This allows text to wrap properly to the next line if needed. The only shortcoming is that the page takes up more vertical space but that's not such a big deal imo.

I'm happy to contribute a patch if someone can point me in the right direction. Is this a problem with sphinx_rtd_theme? I don't recall having similar issues with other packages' docs hosted on readthedocs.

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