[Docutils-users] reST image directive and URL

Hi,

I am *not* subscribed, but would appreciate any replies.

I am using Sphinx document generator with reST to make a
User's Guide for a GCM model, and need to display some images
in external links. If I hardwire the URL as an argument to
the image directive, it works fine, e.g.:

.. image:: http://myurl/pict0001.png

And my image is nicely displayed. However, I do not want to
hardwire the base of this url into many 10's or 100's of image
directives, i.e., I will want to deploy the user's guide where
the url's to the images would be different. (I may have several
images in one URL, e.g., pict0001.png to pict0050.png)

I tried using the Sphinx "extlinks" extension, e.g.:

extlinks = {'data_url': ('http://myurl/%s', 'data_url ')}
.. image:: :data_url:`My picture <pict0001.png>`

but this is ignored by the image directive (works fine elsewhere).
This would be best, because I can use the data_url and add the
image names pict0001.png, pict0002.png,...

So I have also tried both replacement:

.. |pict0001| replace:: http://myurl/pict0001.png
.. image:: |mypict|

and substitution:

.._`pict0001`:
       http://myurl/pict0001.png
.. image:: `pict0001`

These all work inside inline text, but they all fail as an argument
to the image directive. Help?? Thanks,

--Ben Foster
   fo...@uc...