Writing documentation

Getting started

The documentation for AMUSE is generated from ReStructured Text using the Sphinx documentation generation tool. Sphinx version 1.0 or later is required. You might still run into problems, so most developers work from the sphinx source repository (Mercurial based) because it is a rapidly evolving project:

> hg clone http://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/
> cd sphinx
> python setup.py install

The documentation sources are found in the doc/ directory in the trunk. To build the AMUSE documentation in html format, cd into doc/ and do:

make html

You can also pass a pdflatex flag to make to build a pdf, or pass no arguments to show help information.

The output produced by Sphinx can be configured by editing the conf.py file located in the doc/.

Organization of the AMUSE documentation

The actual ReStructured Text files are kept in doc/install, doc/design, doc/tutorial. The main entry point is doc/index.rst. The documentation suite is built as a single document in order to make the most effective use of cross referencing, we want to make navigating the AMUSE documentation as easy as possible.

Additional files can be added to the various sections by including their base file name (the .rst extension is not necessary) in the table of contents.