Python Documentation README

This directory contains the reStructuredText (reST) sources to the Python documentation. You don't need to build them yourself, prebuilt versions are available.

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

Building the docs

You need to have Sphinx installed; it is the toolset used to build the docs. It is not included in this tree, but maintained separately and available from PyPI.

Using make

A Makefile has been prepared so that on Unix, provided you have installed Sphinx, 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 a make.bat file.

To use a Python interpreter that's not called python, use the standard way 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 than sphinx-build), set the 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 page in your default web browser.
"htmlhelp", which builds HTML files and a HTML Help project file usable to convert them into a single Compiled HTML (.chm) file -- these are popular under Microsoft Windows, but very handy on every platform.

To create the CHM file, you need to run the Microsoft HTML Help Workshop over the generated project (.hhp) file. The make.bat script does this for you on Windows.
"latex", which builds LaTeX source files as input to "pdflatex" to produce PDF documents.
"text", which builds a plain text file for each source file.
"epub", which builds an EPUB document, suitable to be viewed on e-book readers.
"linkcheck", which checks all external references to see whether they are broken, redirected or malformed, and outputs this information to stdout as well 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 the writer of the "What's New" document.
"coverage", which builds a coverage overview for standard library modules and C API.
"pydoc-topics", which builds a Python module containing a dictionary with plain text documentation for the labels defined in tools/pyspecific.py -- pydoc needs these to show topic and keyword help.
"suspicious", which checks the parsed markup for text that looks like malformed 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 the Doc directory, run

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

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

Contributing

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

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

You can also send a mail to the Python Documentation Team at docs@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 send a mail to docs@python.org.

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