
Building the documentation
**************************

You need to have Python 2.4 or higher installed; the toolset used to
build the docs is written in Python.  It is called *Sphinx*, it is not
included in this tree, but maintained separately.  Also needed are the
docutils, supplying the base markup that Sphinx uses, Jinja, a
templating engine, and optionally Pygments, a code highlighter.


Using make
==========

Luckily, a Makefile has been prepared so that on Unix, provided you
have installed Python and Subversion, you can just run

   make html

to check out the necessary toolset in the *tools/* subdirectory and
build the HTML output files.  To view the generated HTML, point your
favorite browser at the top-level index *build/html/index.html* after
running "make".

Available make targets are:

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

   * "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.

   * "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.

   * "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/sphinxext/pyspecific.py* -- pydoc needs these to show
     topic and keyword help.

A "make update" updates the Subversion checkouts in *tools/*.


Without make
============

You'll need to install the Sphinx package, either by checking it out
via

   svn co http://svn.python.org/projects/external/Sphinx-0.6.5/sphinx tools/sphinx

or by installing it from PyPI.

Then, you need to install Docutils, either by checking it out via

   svn co http://svn.python.org/projects/external/docutils-0.6/docutils tools/docutils

or by installing it from http://docutils.sf.net/.

You also need Jinja2, either by checking it out via

   svn co http://svn.python.org/projects/external/Jinja-2.3.1/jinja2 tools/jinja2

or by installing it from PyPI.

You can optionally also install Pygments, either as a checkout via

   svn co http://svn.python.org/projects/external/Pygments-1.3.1/pygments tools/pygments

or from PyPI at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pygments.

Then, make an output directory, e.g. under *build/*, and run

   python tools/sphinx-build.py -b<builder> . build/<outputdirectory>

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