PlasmaPy / PlasmaPy

An open source Python package for plasma research and education
http://docs.plasmapy.org
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Add a table of particle aliases to the narrative documentation #1222

Open namurphy opened 3 years ago

namurphy commented 3 years ago

There are a number of aliases accepted by Particle. For example, an alpha particle can be represented by "alpha" or even "α". These are only documented in the code as private variables for case sensitive or case insensitive aliases, but should be added as a table to the narrative documentation for completeness. The table in the docs should be generated from the private variables in plasmapy/particles/parsing.py since the aliases are going to be updated from time to time.

My usual strategy for dealing with dynamically created tables in reStructuredText has been to ignore it and hoping it would go away, but we might be able to look at https://github.com/astropy/astropy/pull/11618. There will probably be other times where we want to create tables, so it'd be helpful to make the code general (and documented) enough that we would be able to make use of it for other cases in the future.

namurphy commented 2 years ago

Another possibility would be using sphinxcontrib.datatemplates.

pheuer commented 2 years ago

As mentioned in #1382 , when this table is added a link should be added to the example notebook "Using PlasmaPy Particles"