README.rst

Python Documentation README

This directory contains the reStructuredText (reST) sources to the Pythondocumentation. You don't need to build them yourself,prebuilt versions areavailable.

Documentation on authoring Python documentation, including information aboutboth style and markup, is available in the "Documenting Python" chapter of thedevelopers guide.

Building the docs

You need to haveSphinx installed; it is the toolsetused to build the docs. It is not included in this tree, but maintainedseparately andavailable from PyPI.

Using make

A Makefile has been prepared so that on Unix, provided you have installedSphinx, you can just run

make html

to build the HTML output files.

On Windows, we try to emulate the Makefile as closely as possible with amake.bat file.

To use a Python interpreter that's not calledpython, use the standardway to set Makefile variables, using e.g.

make html PYTHON=python3

On Windows, set the PYTHON environment variable instead.

To use a specific sphinx-build (something other thansphinx-build), setthe SPHINXBUILD variable.

Available make targets are:

• "clean", which removes all build files.

• "html", which builds standalone HTML files for offline viewing.

• "htmlview", which re-uses the "html" builder, but then opens the main pagein your default web browser.

• "htmlhelp", which builds HTML files and a HTML Help project file usable toconvert them into a single Compiled HTML (.chm) file -- these are popularunder Microsoft Windows, but very handy on every platform.

  To create the CHM file, you need to run the Microsoft HTML Help Workshopover the generated project (.hhp) file. The make.bat script does this foryou on Windows.

• "latex", which builds LaTeX source files as input to "pdflatex" to producePDF documents.

• "text", which builds a plain text file for each source file.

• "epub", which builds an EPUB document, suitable to be viewed on e-bookreaders.

• "linkcheck", which checks all external references to see whether they arebroken, redirected or malformed, and outputs this information to stdout aswell as a plain-text (.txt) file.

• "changes", which builds an overview over all versionadded/versionchanged/deprecated items in the current version. This is meant as a help for thewriter of the "What's New" document.

• "coverage", which builds a coverage overview for standard library modules andC API.

• "pydoc-topics", which builds a Python module containing a dictionary withplain text documentation for the labels defined intools/pyspecific.py -- pydoc needs these to show topic and keyword help.

• "suspicious", which checks the parsed markup for text that looks likemalformed and thus unconverted reST.

• "check", which checks for frequent markup errors.

• "serve", which serves the build/html directory on port 8000.

• "dist", (Unix only) which creates distributable archives of HTML, text,PDF, and EPUB builds.

Without make

Install the Sphinx package and its dependencies from PyPI.

Then, from theDoc directory, run

sphinx-build -b<builder> . build/<builder>

where<builder> is one of html, text, latex, or htmlhelp (for explanationssee the make targets above).

Contributing

Bugs in the content should be reported to thePython bug tracker.

Bugs in the toolset should be reported in theSphinx bug tracker.

You can also send a mail to the Python Documentation Team atdocs@python.org,and we will process your request as soon as possible.

If you want to help the Documentation Team, you are always welcome. Just senda mail todocs@python.org.