Documenting Python

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2 Directory Structure

The source distribution for the standard Python documentation contains a large number of directories. While third-party documents do not need to be placed into this structure or need to be placed within a similar structure, it can be helpful to know where to look for examples and tools when developing new documents using the Python documentation tools. This section describes this directory structure.

The documentation sources are usually placed within the Python source distribution as the top-level directory Doc/, but are not dependent on the Python source distribution in any way.

The Doc/ directory contains a few files and several subdirectories. The files are mostly self-explanatory, including a README and a Makefile. The directories fall into three categories:

Document Sources

The L^ATEX sources for each document are placed in a separate directory. These directories are given short names which vaguely indicate the document in each:

Directory	Document Title
api/	The Python/C API
dist/	Distributing Python Modules
doc/	Documenting Python
ext/	Extending and Embedding the Python Interpreter
inst/	Installing Python Modules
lib/	Python Library Reference
mac/	Macintosh Module Reference
ref/	Python Reference Manual
tut/	Python Tutorial

Format-Specific Output

Most output formats have a directory which contains a Makefile which controls the generation of that format and provides storage for the formatted documents. The only variations within this category are the Portable Document Format (PDF) and PostScript versions are placed in the directories paper-a4/ and paper-letter/ (this causes all the temporary files created by L^ATEX to be kept in the same place for each paper size, where they can be more easily ignored).

Directory	Output Formats
html/	HTML output
info/	GNU info output
isilo/	iSilo documents (for Palm OS devices)
paper-a4/	PDF and PostScript, A4 paper
paper-letter/	PDF and PostScript, US-Letter paper

Supplemental Files

Some additional directories are used to store supplemental files used for the various processes. Directories are included for the shared L^ATEX document classes, the L^ATEX2HTML support, template files for various document components, and the scripts used to perform various steps in the formatting processes.

Directory	Contents
commontex/	Document content shared among documents
perl/	Support for LATEX2HTML processing
templates/	Example files for source documents
texinputs/	Style implementation for LATEX
tools/	Custom processing scripts

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Documenting Python

Previous: 1 Introduction Up: Documenting Python Next: 3 Style Guide

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Release 2.3.4, documentation updated on December 23, 2004.