Documenting Python

Python 3.2.1

Documenting Python

The Python language has a substantial body of documentation, much of it contributed by various authors. The markup used for the Python documentation is reStructuredText, developed by the docutils project, amended by custom directives and using a toolset named Sphinx to postprocess the HTML output.

This document describes the style guide for our documentation as well as the custom reStructuredText markup introduced by Sphinx to support Python documentation and how it should be used.

Note

If you’re interested in contributing to Python’s documentation, there’s no need to write reStructuredText if you’re not so inclined; plain text contributions are more than welcome as well. Send an e-mail to docs@python.org or open an issue on the tracker.