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# Welcome

What users say:

“Cheers for a great tool that actually makes programmers want to write documentation!“

Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation, written by Georg Brandl and licensed under the BSD license.

It was originally created for the Python documentation, and it has excellent facilities for the documentation of software projects in a range of languages. Of course, this site is also created from reStructuredText sources using Sphinx! The following features should be highlighted:

- Output formats: HTML (including Windows HTML Help), LaTeX (for printable PDF versions), ePub, Texinfo, manual pages, plain text
- Extensive cross-references: semantic markup and automatic links for functions, classes, citations, glossary terms and similar pieces of information
- Hierarchical structure: easy definition of a document tree, with automatic links to siblings, parents and children
- Automatic indices: general index as well as a language-specific module indices
- Code handling: automatic highlighting using the Pygments highlighter
- Extensions: automatic testing of code snippets, inclusion of docstrings from Python modules (API docs), and more
- Contributed extensions: more than 50 extensions contributed by users in a second repository; most of them installable from PyPI

Sphinx uses reStructuredText as its markup language, and many of its strengths come from the power and straightforwardness of reStructuredText and its parsing and translating suite, the Docutils.

## Documentation

First steps with Sphinx overview of basic tasks | Search page search the documentation
Contents for a complete overview | General Index all functions, classes, terms
Changes release history |

You can also download PDF/EPUB versions of the Sphinx documentation: a PDF version generated from the LaTeX Sphinx produces, and a EPUB version.

## Examples

Links to documentation generated with Sphinx can be found on the Projects using Sphinx page.

For examples of how Sphinx source files look, use the “Show source” links on all pages of the documentation apart from this welcome page.

You may also be interested in the very nice tutorial on how to create a customized documentation using Sphinx written by the matplotlib developers.

There is a Japanese translation of this documentation, thanks to the Japanese Sphinx user group.

A Japanese book about Sphinx has been published by O'Reilly: Sphinxをはじめよう / Learning Sphinx.

## Hosting

Need a place to host your Sphinx docs? readthedocs.org hosts a lot of Sphinx docs already, and integrates well with projects' source control. It also features a powerful built-in search that exceeds the possibilities of Sphinx' JavaScript-based offline search.

## Contributor Guide

If you want to contribute to the project, this part of the documentation is for you.

- Sphinx Developer’s Guide
- Sphinx Authors