Great to hear!

From currcent CI (e.g. https://output.circle-artifacts.com/output/job/49f53ea8-b87c-4ac6-9d04-9d6431a5a069/artifacts/0/doc/build/html/api/patches_api.html)

• The SVG output has a larger box with significant whitespace at the bottom. (compare https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/api/patches_api.html)
• The links do not work in CI, but that may be a CI issue?

We definitively want to enforce sphinx >=7.2 with this, which means we should wait just a bit (7.2 is only 5 days old).

The links do not work in CI, but that may be a CI issue?

I don't think it's a CI issue; the SVG are placed in /_images and use links like ../html/_as_gen/matplotlib.patches.ConnectionPatch.html#matplotlib.patches.ConnectionPatch. This is entirely wrong; html is the base of build output directory and should not be part of the link.

Hmm, these both appear to be bugs, so I'll drop this PR to draft for now.

• The SVG output has a larger box with significant whitespace at the bottom. (compare https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/api/patches_api.html)

The generated SVG files have incorrect scale factors, which appears to be a bug in graphviz. This line in your conf.py sets a gigantic maximum size of the graph, but the XML continues to include a non-unity scale factor, so essentially the graph gets additionally scaled on display.

I'll point out that you are currently installing graphviz via apt on Ubuntu, which is stuck on version 2.42.x despite being several years old. Version 2.42.x of graphviz has a known bug with the scaling factor – although that's not causing the issue here – so, for example, on sunpy we build the Read the Docs environment with graphviz installed via conda-forge (see https://github.com/sunpy/sunpy/blob/2e8c2de0de0ba855f626896ba0418f0b7e651cbf/.rtd-environment.yml#L8). Assuming that the above is a bug in graphviz, and it gets fixed, you probably won't get the bugfix unless you move away from installing graphviz via apt.

• The links do not work in CI, but that may be a CI issue?

It looks like there is something particular to matplotlib's configuration that is tripping up generating the correct links, so sphinx might need a bug fix. I'll investigate.

Lest I come across as a crazy person, here's an example from the astropy documentation showing the SVG inheritance diagrams working with sphinx 7.2:
https://docs.astropy.org/en/latest/time/ref_api.html#class-inheritance-diagram

The links do not work in CI, but that may be a CI issue?

I don't think it's a CI issue; the SVG are placed in /_images and use links like ../html/_as_gen/matplotlib.patches.ConnectionPatch.html#matplotlib.patches.ConnectionPatch. This is entirely wrong; html is the base of build output directory and should not be part of the link.

Correct, something somewhere is getting confused about paths.

I'll note that when the links are fixed, it's possible that CircleCI will prevent being able to follow the links. The tokening for accessing artifacts seems rather aggressive, so may not like links from embedded SVG files. However, this is not something to worry about until the links are actually fixed.

• The SVG output has a larger box with significant whitespace at the bottom. (compare https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/api/patches_api.html)

The dpi=100 that was added in #22273 leads graphviz to add the scaling factor, so I removed the dpi specification.

• The links do not work in CI, but that may be a CI issue?

I have posted a PR to sphinx (sphinx-doc/sphinx#11634) that fixes the bugs with the links. (I have built the docs locally to confirm.)

Thanks for pushing the issues upstream to Sphinx! Let’s wait with this PR until Sphinx has released a fix.

I added a (temporary) commit to install sphinx from my fork to verify that the bugfixes work, which would be reverted once sphinx-doc/sphinx#11634 is merged and released. For example, https://output.circle-artifacts.com/output/job/7ec86fa7-c90e-4edf-8ec4-7571950c07a4/artifacts/0/doc/build/html/api/patches_api.html. Unfortunately, as I feared, it looks like CircleCI doesn't let you access linked pages from the SVG even when they are correct, so you have to manually inspect the links to see that they will work.

sphinx-doc/sphinx#11634 is included in Sphinx 7.2.5, which was just released today. I've verified through building the docs locally that the inheritance-diagram links are correct, which can also be verified by inspecting the links in the CircleCI build (despite the fact that clicking on the links does not work).

I've squashed and rebased on main. Let's see how this renders with current Sphinx.

Looks like you didn't rebase against a current main, as it doesn't have ninja installed.

Looks like this still works as intended to have SVG inheritance diagrams, e.g.:

https://output.circle-artifacts.com/output/job/85987d9b-2815-428a-bd67-8cae86e85de5/artifacts/0/doc/build/html/api/patches_api.html

As before, clicking links in the CircleCI build doesn't work, so links have to be manually inspected. For example, the Artist box in the SVG graph has the link:

https://circleci-tasks-prod.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/forks/storage/artifacts/0e05288a-f55e-43b7-89a0-cc2c3c67bf8e/602836057/85987d9b-2815-428a-bd67-8cae86e85de5/0/doc/build/html/api/artist_api.html#matplotlib.artist.Artist

and the important part is that doc/build/html/api/artist_api.html#matplotlib.artist.Artist is correct.