This page is primarily about tools that help, specifically, in generating documentation for software written in Python, i.e., tools that can use language-specific features to automate at least a part of the code documentation work for you. The last section also lists general documentation tools with no specific support for Python (though some of them are themselves written in Python).

Tools that support auto-documentation of code can be broadly classified into tools that:

See here for a longer explanation of the two concepts.

Tools that generate documentation from user-provided input typically use plain text markup formats such as reStructuredText (reST, the markup used for writing the official Python documentation) or Markdown.

Python docstrings

Python modules are usually documented using docstrings. You can read a module's docstrings from the Python interactive prompt with the help() function. For example:

import distutils
help(distutils)

The help() function uses Python's standard pydoc module, as does the pydoc command that comes with Python.

Automatic Python API documentation generation tools

No longer under development

Documentation processing tools

Other projects that can be used to produce API documentation

Other documentation processing tools


CategoryDocumentation

DocumentationTools (last edited 2023-02-04 13:42:35 by GilOliveira)

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