docs/source/development/doc_guide.txt

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.

In the future, the text files in the ``docs`` directory will be used to
generate all forms of documentation for IPython. This include documentation on
the IPython website as well as *pdf* documentation.

.. _reStructuredText: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

A bit of shell code:

.. code-block:: bash

    cd /tmp
    echo "My home directory is: $HOME"
    ls

A bit of Python code:

.. code-block:: python

    for i in range(10):
        print i,
    print "A big number:",2**34

An interactive Python session:

.. code-block:: python

    >>> from IPython import genutils
    >>> genutils.get_ipython_dir()
    '/home/fperez/.ipython'


An IPython session:

.. code-block:: ipython

  In [8]: import IPython

  In [9]: print "This IPython is version:",IPython.__version__
  This IPython is version: 0.9.1



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
<http://epydoc.sourceforge.net/manual-othermarkup.html>`_.

.. _Epydoc: http://epydoc.sourceforge.net/

Additional PEPs of interest regarding documentation of code:

- `Docstring Conventions <http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0257.html>`_
- `Docstring Processing System Framework <http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0256.html>`_
- `Docutils Design Specification <http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0258.html>`_