.. _documenting-ipython: ===================== Documenting IPython ===================== Standalone documentation ======================== All standalone documentation should be written in plain text (``.txt``) files using `reStructuredText`_ for markup and formatting. All such documentation should be placed in the top level directory ``docs`` of the IPython source tree. Or, when appropriate, a suitably named subdirectory should be used. The documentation in this location will serve as the main source for IPython documentation and all existing documentation should be converted to this format. The actual HTML and PDF docs are built using the Sphinx_ documentation generation tool. Sphinx has been adopted as the default documentation tool for Python itself as of version 2.6, as well as by a number of projects that IPython is related with, such as numpy, scipy, matplotlib, sage and nipy. .. _reStructuredText: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html .. _Sphinx: http://sphinx.pocoo.org/ The rest of this document is mostly taken from the `matploblib documentation`__; we are using a number of Sphinx tools and extensions written by the matplotlib team and will mostly follow their conventions, which are nicely spelled out in their guide. What follows is thus a lightly adapted version of the matplotlib documentation guide, taken with permission from the MPL team. .. __: http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/doc/html/devel/documenting_mpl.html A bit of Python code:: for i in range(10): print i, print "A big number:",2**34 An interactive Python session:: >>> from IPython import genutils >>> genutils.get_ipython_dir() '/home/fperez/.ipython' An IPython session: .. code-block:: ipython In [7]: import IPython In [8]: print "This IPython is version:",IPython.__version__ This IPython is version: 0.9.1 In [9]: 2+4 Out[9]: 6 A bit of shell code: .. code-block:: bash cd /tmp echo "My home directory is: $HOME" ls Docstring format ================ Good docstrings are very important. All new code will use `Epydoc`_ for generating API docs, so we will follow the `Epydoc`_ conventions. More specifically, we will use `reStructuredText`_ for markup and formatting, since it is understood by a wide variety of tools. This means that if in the future we have any reason to change from `Epydoc`_ to something else, we'll have fewer transition pains. Details about using `reStructuredText`_ for docstrings can be found `here `_. .. _Epydoc: http://epydoc.sourceforge.net/ Additional PEPs of interest regarding documentation of code: - `Docstring Conventions `_ - `Docstring Processing System Framework `_ - `Docutils Design Specification `_