Welcome

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 to translate the new Python documentation, and it has excellent support for the documentation of Python projects, but other documents can be written with it too. Of course, this site is also created from reStructuredText sources using Sphinx!

It is still under constant development, and the following features are already present, work fine and can be seen “in action” in the Python docs:

• Output formats: HTML (including Windows HTML Help) and LaTeX, for printable PDF versions
• Extensive cross-references: semantic markup and automatic links for functions, classes, 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 module index
• Code handling: automatic highlighting using the Pygments highlighter
• Extensions: automatic testing of code snippets, inclusion of docstrings from Python modules, and more

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.

Examples

The Python documentation and this page are different examples of Sphinx in use. You can also download a PDF version of the Sphinx documentation, generated from the LaTeX Sphinx produces.

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

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

Documentation

Get Sphinx

Sphinx is available as an easy-installable package on the Python Package Index.

The code can be found in a Mercurial repository, at http://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/.