Sphinx generates some nice and very readable html files. In this blog post, ill provide examples of how i like to set up the documentation for my python project using sphinx. How to create pdf documentation with sphinx in windows. I am using sphinx to create documentation for my python project in windows. How to create a single file of sphinx based documentation. Despite it being written in plaintext, it is powerful enough to create professional technical documentation, books, and websites. It was originally created in 2008 to document the python language itself over the past eight years, it has turned into a robust and mature solution for software documentation. Usually the package is called python3sphinx, pythonsphinxor sphinx.
Well also integrate this process into a cmake build system so that we have a unified workflow. This is generally the best way to view sphinx based documents since they often make frequent use of links and do not take this limitation into account. Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation, written by georg brandl and licensed under the bsd license. In particular, these three sphinx extensions are helpful. Sphinx, mythological creature with a lions body and a human head, an important image in egyptian and greek art and legend. All of these are widely available and packaged in distributions. Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation for python projects or other documents consisting of multiple restructuredtext sources, written by georg brandl. As i mentioned in a previous blog post, i used sphinx to write my book, music for geeks and nerds. Please check out the documentation of sphinx doc or restructuredtext if you are not familiar with it. Building sphinx documentation openmc documentation. Building the pdf file would fail if your python version is. Oct 29, 2010 sphinx generates some nice and very readable html files. Sphinx extends rest with a collection of directives and interpreted text roles for crossreferencing, tables of contents, code examples, and specially formatted paragraphs like notes, alerts, warnings, etc.
This tool provides an alternative by producing pdf directly using the reportlab library. Create the pdf file now to create a pdf out of the html documentation that you have created, do the following go to your sphinx documentation folder, open conf. Nov 18, 2015 last week, in write documentation once, output multiple formats with sphinx we learned how to install the sphinx documentation generator, and how to build html, pdf, epub, and other documents from a new sphinx installation. It might have thought none of your pages changed, so it didnt rebuild anything. May 09, 2020 the sphinx quickstart utility is performed only once for a particular directory.
This blog post provides an introduction to using sphinx for a simple python project. Sphinx, written by georg brandl and licensed under the bsd license, was originally created for the python documentation and it has excellent facilities for the documentation of software projects in a range of languages sphinxdoc. How to create a pdfoutofsphinxdocumentationtool stack. In order to build the documentation in the docs directory, you will need to have the sphinx thirdparty python package. Building and uploading your sphinx docs to pypi an. Sphinx is the documentation tool of choice for the python language community, and increasingly also for other programming languages and tools. Using sphinx to write technical books pedro kroger. Fix this by running a make clean html, which will force a full rebuild. Generating python documentation for packagesmodules can be quite time consuming, but theres a way to generate it automatically from docstrings. The sphinx documentation provides a brief introduction to rest concepts and syntax. There are some convenience makefiles that work for most use cases.
Introduction the linux kernel uses sphinx to generate pretty documentation from restructuredtext files under documentation. The following table lists some useful lexers in no particular order. If set to the value of hide, emacs will hide both the note. If you want to generate the sphinx infrastructure in a different directory, specify it in the sphinx working directory field of the python integrated tools page. Further references for continuing to learn about sphinx and autogenerating your documentation are below. This screencast will help you get started or you can read our guide below. If you make a fresh version of the documentation, remember to. Here are a few adjustments you can make to a sphinx project once you have its. Not yet fully migrated from the previous version, so at the moment, they are broken into two different parts. To pass extra options to sphinx, you can use the sphinxopts make.
By default sphinx uses pdflatex, which does not have good support for unicode characters and may make the pdf builder fail. Today were going to create a small test project with some original content, and mark it up using rst, the native sphinx. For example, if sphinx is directed to generate a pdf from a documentation source, the file would be placed in the build directory. To make your documentation look beautiful, you can take advantage of sphinx, which is designed to make pretty python documents. You can also reference classes, modules, functions, etc that are documented using the sphinx autodoc facilites. The generated documentation is placed in documentationoutput.
This python document generator uses restructuredtest as its markup language. Sphinx user manual, with api and configuration reference. This means that it takes a bunch of source files in plain text, and generates a bunch of other awesome things, mainly html. The only problem i encountered today was that the provided makefile or make. There are several different docstring formats which one can use in order to enable sphinx s autodoc extension to automatically generate documentation. When we build your sphinx documentation, we run sphinx buildb. Tools cant solve this problem in themselves, but they can ease the pain. To generate documentation, sphinx sphinx build must obviously be installed. Sphinx is a python documentation generator, it was created to generate the python documentation, so it is a very complete tool. The good news is that there are several tools that will make presenting and publishing it very easy, leaving you only to write the content and mark it up.
The exact behavior of how emacs displays references is dependent on the variable infohidenotereferences. Documentation style guide style guide for sphinxbased. If a techcomm team is unable to easily export documentation to pdf using the existing tool, then it doesnt prop. Once sphinx is installed, you can proceed with setting up your first sphinx project. Automatic python documentation with sphinx autodoc and. Sphinx has a page with more info on sphinxstyle restructuredtext syntax, and heres a page with general restructuredtext syntax. Aug 31, 2014 sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation. If you rebuild your documentation, you will see the new theme. For this tutorial we will use the sphinx format, since, as the name suggests, it is the standar format used with sphinx. Miscellaneous djangosphinxdoc integrate sphinx documentation into a djangopowered website.
Rinohtype, paired with sphinx offers a modern alternative to latex. So readers using such programs actually lose some content. At first, it seemed that in order to print the whole documentation i should either. Once these files are built, they are deployed to our file hosting backend and will be visible to users. By properly documenting your source code, sphinx will be able to generate nice looking documentation i like html for your project. It generates documentation simply from your projects alreadyexisting public modules and objects docstrings, like sphinx apidoc or sphinx. A simple tutorial on how to document your python project. This behavior can be changed, but for consistency we will stick to the default format. Add images rst sphinx sublime github documentation. This post is mostly a summary of the fantastic guide by sam nicholls found here, but with one important addition see the section on mocking. Sphinx is a handy python based utility that can take plain text documents and generate beautiful documentation in rich formats such as html or pdf with just a minimal amount of markup to indicate things like headers or code blocks. The answer by vimalkumar velayudhan is really helpful, but, on the other hand, its too advanced to use for a common technical writer. However, sphinxquickstart script creates a makefile and a make. The restructuredtext book documentation, release 1.
The generated documentation is placed in documentation output the restructuredtext files may contain directives to include structured documentation comments, or kerneldoc comments. Create a pdf document from your sphinx documentation using. To create initial infrastructure for sphinx documentation. It is easy to read and write because it is just regular text and all you need is a simple text editor. To ease the process of getting started, sphinx provides a tool, sphinxquickstart, which will generate a documentation source directory and populate it with some defaults. Awesome sphinx python documentation generator github. It was originally created for the python documentation, and it has excellent facilities for the documentation of software projects in a range of languages. Specify a directory name as rooth path for the documentation, say api, give the documentation a title, author, and version number. Python documentation using sphinx patricks software blog. The earliest and most famous example in art is the colossal recumbent great sphinx at giza, egypt, dating from the reign of king khafre c. Sphinx uses restructuredtext as its markup language, and many of its strengths come from the power and. Documenting python packages with sphinx and readthedocs. Generate web pages, printable pdfs, documents for ereaders epub, and more all from the same sources.
The essential sphinx markup cheatsheet for faster documentation. You can use restructuredtext or markdown to write documentation. Allows you to use your sites templates, auth and so on. Ensure that the sphinx package has been installed with the project interpreter. An introduction to sphinx and read the docs for technical. To build the documentation in html or pdf formats, use make htmldocs or make pdfdocs. How to create a single file of sphinx based documentation g. Sphinx is a pythonbased documentation system that allows writing documentation in a simple markup language called restructuredtext, which can then be converted to html or to latex files and then to pdf or postscript. The linux kernel uses sphinx to generate pretty documentation from restructuredtext files under documentation. There are a few different ways to do this, but i prefer using mathjax via the mathjax extension. Writing docstrings sphinxrtdtutorial documentation. Documentation with sphinx salish sea meopar documentation. The generated documentation is placed in documentation output. Succeeded in pdf generation via latex for windows 10.
Enter pdoc, the perfect documentation generator for smalltomediumsized, tidy python projects. May 03, 2012 now to create a pdf out of the html documentation that you have created, do the following go to your sphinx documentation folder, open conf. Sphinx is sensitive to indentation blocks and code snippets end when the indentation level returns to its previous level but sphinx is usually forgiving about how far exactly you. First, create a doc directory at the root level and cd into that directory sphinxs quick start program will give you an option to make makefile and a windows. Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation.
How to create a pdf out of sphinx documentation tool. When you need to read html builds of the documentation, best practice is to export documentation as static builds with sphinx build command, then host and serve these builds as static files. With sphinx i could generate html, epub, mobi for the kindle, and two pdf versions blackandwhite and color. Sphinx uses restructuredtext as its markup language, and. It is easy to make a link to yahoo or to some section inside this document see making a table or another document. As far as i understand i need to create latex format with sphinx, and than use texworks to convert latex to pdf. The usual way of creating pdf from restructuredtext is by going through latex.
I found many explanation how to do this in linux, but no good explanation how to do this in windows. Thats because sphinx is smart, and only rebuilds pages that have changed. To build your documentation in pdf format, you need to configure sphinx properly in your projects conf. Generate sphinx documentation python documentation generator. Nov 09, 2016 the absolute coolest thing about sphinx is that it creates a search page for your documentation. For public projects, you may have a look at services like read the docs 5. Sphinx quickstart asks if you want to create one, and the default answer at least on windows is yes. Sphinx supports including latexstyle equations in the documentations. Read the docs will execute the proper commands depending on these settings. First, create a doc directory at the root level and cd into that directory sphinx s quick start program will give you an option to make makefile and a windows.
These can be executed by running make with the name of the builder. Sphinx is a powerful documentation generator that has many great features for writing technical documentation including. Finally, clicking on basicclass should the documentation for the class in your source code. Sphinx works quite nicely outofthebox for documenting computer programs, but i had to bend it a little to generate output more suitable for a book. This article will focus on generating sphinx documentation as automatic as possible, allowing to generate documentation out of your pydoc. Sphinx is what is called a documentation generator. Have your packages toplevel directory sit right next to your sphinx makefileand conf. Now to create a pdf out of the html documentation that you have created, do the following go to your sphinx documentation folder, open conf. Refer to the sphinxbuild man page for all options that sphinxbuild supports. This mainly applies to proper commit messages describing your change how and why. The restructured text format, the simple markup format used in the plain text documents, is very simple to use and.
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