Give the reference quadrant a landing page of cards

[bjlittle]

Builds the reference quadrant's card landing page, specified in #327 (narrative spec §3.9, amendment of 2026-09-15) and planned in #329. Executed task by task, each task reviewed on its own, then the branch reviewed as a whole.

What changed

Task	Commit	Change
1	cf2bc73	tests/test_docs_landing_pages.py reads cards: CARD_SECTIONS beside TABLE_SECTIONS, card_targets, and the API page derived by executing conf.py, since it exists only while a build runs. The same four checks now run over both shapes, and an entry that reaches outside its section with .. is refused.
2	46fe98a	The root page's card classes renamed teph-quadrant → teph-card, teph-quadrant-icon → teph-card-icon. teph-quadrant-button, the topics page's, is untouched.
3	c4bc9a5	Seven icon pairs in docs/src/_static/cards/reference/, each dark file its light file with exactly two colours swapped; the root page's dark Tutorials halo corrected from #20242b to #14181e.
4	bfb7b65	docs/src/reference/index.rst becomes a 1 2 2 2 grid of seven cards with the API card leading at full width; the reference quadrant joins CARD_SECTIONS.
5	c070890	The style guide's Landing Pages rule rewritten for two shapes; the signpost test's docstring corrected.
—	bd69593	The plan's Task 4 Step 5 restores corrected (below).

Measured, not assumed

• The rename moved nothing. The root page's card text columns measured 114px at 360, 154px at 576 and 330px at 1280, before and after. At 576px a broken icon rule would have widened the column to 222px.
• A card raises no tooltip — hovering a card raised 0, and the control, a table link on the how-to page, raised 1, so the probe works.
• A missing icon fails the build. Mutation (e), unmeasured when the plan was written: removing api-light.svg made pixi run docs-html exit 2 with image file not readable. So the specification's choice to leave icons ungated costs nothing here.
• Each gate check was proven by mutation on the real page: reordering, linking outside the section, an :orphan: page, and an unhidden toctree each fail the check named for them.
• The suite's growth is accounted for exactly: 2337 passed against main's 2321 — 5 unit tests, 1 one-shape check, 6 one-index instances, and 4 [reference] instances of the existing checks.

A plan defect found by executing it

Task 4 Step 5 restored each mutation with git checkout -- docs/src/reference/index.rst. Before that task's own commit, HEAD holds the page the task replaces, so the restore would have destroyed the new page. The implementer caught it on the first mutation and restored from a saved copy; the committed page was verified byte-identical to the plan's text. The dry run done before #329 missed it because it restored with cp rather than the plan's own command. The plan is corrected on this branch, which a plan still admits until its implementation merges (docs spec §3.4).

Left as they are, on purpose

Three minor points from the whole-branch review, each ruled on:

• A CSS comment wraps mid-clause — it is the plan's verbatim wording, and cosmetic.
• card_targets would read the last of two :link: options on one card — malformed markup nobody writes.
• No test holds each dark icon to its light twin — narrative spec §3.9 keeps icons ungated as presentation.

Verification

On c070890, the last commit to touch code or pages: pixi run lint every hook passes, and pixi run docs builds clean with every gate passing. On bd69593, which changes only the plan: pixi run tests 2337 passed, 2 skipped, and every hook passes on the plan file.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01C79QePZ862i61EJodupwVT

[read-the-docs-community]

Documentation build overview

📚 tephpy | 🛠️ Build #34572482 | 📁 Comparing ee80574 against latest (9ba9849)

  🔍 Preview build  

12 files changed · ± 12 modified

± Modified

• sg_execution_times.html
• developer/docs-style.html
• gallery/plot_hodograph.html
• gallery/plot_parcel_analysis.html
• gallery/plot_sounding.html
• gallery/plot_sounding_comparison.html
• gallery/plot_tephigram.html
• gallery/sg_execution_times.html
• reference/changelog.html
• reference/index.html
• and 2 more...