We've been working behind the scenes on a new documentation system for matplotlib, which integrates the web site, API documentation and PDF guide into a single source of sphinx/rest documents which are easier to maintain and extend, hopefully leading to better and more up-to-date docs.
We went live with the new site yesterday: http://matplotlib.sf.net so check it out and let us know if something is broken or missing. We don't have everything that was on the old site (some stuff from the FAQ, "what's new" and "user's guide" has not been ported over) but we do have should be current, searchable, indexed and cross-linked. Thanks to Darren Dale who spear-headed the effort to use the sphinx documentation, and to the developers who have contributed, especially Michael Droettboom, who has developed several nice sphinx extensions to do inheritance diagrams, syntax highlighting of ipython sessions, and inline plotting. As an example we can include plots in our API documentation, see http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/api/axes_api.html#matplotlib.axes.Axes.acorr We embed these plots with a "plot" directive that generates the figures from external code at documentation build time, which guarantees that the example code you see in the docs generate the figures you see in the docs. For example, in the acorr docstring, all we have to do is:: **Example:** .. plot:: ../mpl_examples/pylab_examples/xcorr_demo.py and the figure and source code links automagically appear in the docs. Because some of these extensions are generally useful, Michael, Fernando and I have been working on a "sphinx_template" which contains the template of a sphinx documentation project with these extensions in place, so people who want to get started using sphinx (the official documentation system for python, numpy, ipython and matplotlib) can do so more easily. Right now it is available in svn > svn co https://matplotlib.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/matplotlib/trunk/py4science/examples/sphinx_template2 and see the README in the checkout directory. Michael also did a talk on matplotlib's use of sphinx and the sphinx template at the last scipy conference. We're still waiting for the videos of the talks to be posted (can someone poke someone?) but you can see the talk PDF from the proceedings here: http://conference.scipy.org/proceedings/SciPy2008/paper_6/ JDH ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
