How to add extra whitespace between section header and a paragraph
You can use vertical bars at the beginning of lines to produce blank lines in the output. Like this:
Heading-------||Paragraph with text.
I just had this problem and as davidjb pointed out, using | gives you too much space on LaTeX output. This is how I solved it. Define the following:
.. |vspace| raw:: latex \vspace{5mm}Then you can just use |vspace| on the places where you want the vertical space to get appropriate vertical space.
If you want spaces in html output as well, you can define:
.. |vspace| raw:: latex \vspace{5mm}.. |br| raw:: html <br />Then when you need the space, simply put:
|vspace| |br|and it will automatically take care of the spacing depending on the output format.