{% extends "layout.html" %}
{% set title = 'Overview' %}
{% block body %}
  <h1>Welcome</h1>

  <div class="quotebar">
    <p><em>What users say:</em></p>
    <p>&ldquo;Cheers for a great tool that actually makes programmers <b>want</b>
      to write documentation!&rdquo;</p>
  </div>

  <p>
    Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful
    documentation, written by Georg Brandl and licensed under the BSD license.</p>
  <p>It was originally created for <a href="http://docs.python.org/dev/">the
    new Python documentation</a>, and it has excellent facilities for the
    documentation of Python projects, but C/C++ is already supported as well,
    and it is planned to add special support for other languages as well.  Of
    course, this site is also created from reStructuredText sources using
    Sphinx!
  </p>
  <p>
    Sphinx is under constant development.  The following features are present,
    work fine and can be seen &#8220;in action&#8221; in the Python docs:
  </p>
  <ul>
    <li><b>Output formats:</b> HTML (including Windows HTML Help), LaTeX (for
      printable PDF versions), manual pages, plain text</li>
    <li><b>Extensive cross-references:</b> semantic markup and automatic links
      for functions, classes, citations, glossary terms and similar pieces of
      information</li>
    <li><b>Hierarchical structure:</b> easy definition of a document tree, with
      automatic links to siblings, parents and children</li>
    <li><b>Automatic indices:</b> general index as well as a module index</li>
    <li><b>Code handling:</b> automatic highlighting using the <a
      href="http://pygments.org">Pygments</a> highlighter</li>
    <li><b>Extensions:</b> automatic testing of code snippets, inclusion of
      docstrings from Python modules (API docs), and more</li>
  </ul>
  <p>
    Sphinx uses <a href="http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html">reStructuredText</a>
    as its markup language, and many of its strengths come from the power and
    straightforwardness of reStructuredText and its parsing and translating
    suite, the <a href="http://docutils.sf.net/">Docutils</a>.
  </p>

  <h2>Documentation</h2>

  <table class="contentstable" align="center" style="margin-left: 30px"><tr>
    <td width="50%">
      <p class="biglink"><a class="biglink" href="{{ pathto("tutorial") }}">First steps with Sphinx</a><br/>
         <span class="linkdescr">overview of basic tasks</span></p>
      <p class="biglink"><a class="biglink" href="{{ pathto("contents") }}">Contents</a><br/>
         <span class="linkdescr">for a complete overview</span></p>
    </td><td width="50%">
      <p class="biglink"><a class="biglink" href="{{ pathto("search") }}">Search page</a><br/>
         <span class="linkdescr">search the documentation</span></p>
      <p class="biglink"><a class="biglink" href="{{ pathto("genindex") }}">General Index</a><br/>
         <span class="linkdescr">all functions, classes, terms</span></p>
    </td></tr>
  </table>

  <p>
    You can also download PDF versions of the Sphinx documentation:
    a <a href="http://sphinx.pocoo.org/sphinx.pdf">version</a> generated from
    the LaTeX Sphinx produces, and
    a <a href="http://sphinx.pocoo.org/sphinx-rst2pdf.pdf">version</a> generated
    by rst2pdf.
  </p>

  <h2>Examples</h2>
  <p>Links to documentation generated with Sphinx can be found on the
    <a href="{{ pathto("examples") }}">Projects using Sphinx</a> page.
  </p>
  <p>
    For examples of how Sphinx source files look, use the &#8220;Show
    source&#8221; links on all pages of the documentation apart from this
    welcome page.
  </p>

  <p>You may also be interested in the very nice
    <a href="http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/sampledoc/">tutorial</a> on how to
    create a customized documentation using Sphinx written by the matplotlib
    developers.</p>

  <p>There is a <a href="http://sphinx.shibu.jp/">Japanese translation</a>
    of this documentation, thanks to Yoshiki Shibukawa.</p>

  <h2>Get Sphinx</h2>
  <p>
    Sphinx is available as an <a
    href="http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall">easy-install</a>able
    package on the <a href="http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Sphinx">Python Package
    Index</a>.
  </p>
  <p>The code can be found in a Mercurial repository, at
    <tt>http://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/</tt>.</p>

{% endblock %}
