Does sphinx-gallery allow bare rst files in the python directory? That would be easiest (plus a redirect).

I don't think so. It's probably renaming to .py and adding comments in front of every line, or .. include: interactive.rst.

Can I take up this issue? @timhoffm

Go for it.

I think we should be pushing things the other way and converting more tutorials to be adjacent to these (to separate out the "how to do a task" from "understand how Matplotlib views the world".

To me the current division is whether the page is made via Sphinx gallery or as rst. Ideally there would be a way to combine technology (or even better allow notebooks)

@jklymak https://nbsphinx.readthedocs.io/en/0.6.1/subdir/gallery.html

And also then would that division be

• tutorials: *.ipynb
• gallery: *.py
• narrative docs: *.rst

which is a bit medium guides the message & I think could either work really well to set expectations on content for each section or end up really clunky.

fwiw I would also much prefer if s-g could be made to support .rst files, just for editing convenience (e.g. I have better syntax highlighting, and shortcut for directly converting a single rst to html (obviously, some links will be broken, but you still catch plenty of simple rst syntax errors in that way)).

fwiw I would also much prefer if s-g could be made to support .rst file

sphinx-gallery/sphinx-gallery#330

I guess I was thinking even simpler - just support the rst files directly without worrying about backlinks etc.

However, those links are useful in pointing out that its probably OK to just have an rst->py converter that would only need to be run once to make the files such that s-g could render them.

The overarching point is that it would be nice if our docs were not organized by the rendering technology, which is why "Users Guide" is different than "Tutorials" currently.

I'm closing this issue because it's not clear how we want to origanize the different doc types. For now, we won't convert the existing narrative docs. At least they are put in a better location by #20867.