We are using Sphinx with Napoleon extension. Moreover, we set Google style to follow with type convention.

• Napoleon formatting with Google style
• ReStructured Text (reST)
• Paragraph-level markup

See following short example of a sample function taking one position string and optional

from typing import Optional


def my_func(param_a: int, param_b: Optional[float] = None) -> str:
    """Sample function.

    Args:
        param_a: first parameter
        param_b: second parameter

    Return:
        sum of both numbers

    Example::

        >>> my_func(1, 2)
        3

    Note:
        If you want to add something.
    """
    p = param_b if param_b else 0
    return str(param_a + p)

When updating the docs, make sure to build them first locally and visually inspect the html files in your browser for formatting errors. In certain cases, a missing blank line or a wrong indent can lead to a broken layout. Run these commands

git submodule update --init --recursive
make docs

and open docs/build/html/index.html in your browser.

When you send a PR the continuous integration will run tests and build the docs.

Notes:

• You need to have LaTeX installed for rendering math equations. You can for example install TeXLive with the necessary extras by doing one of the following:
  • on Ubuntu (Linux) run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y texlive-latex-extra dvipng texlive-pictures
  • use the RTD docker image
• You need to have pandoc installed for rendering Jupyter Notebooks. On Ubuntu (Linux), you can run: sudo apt-get install pandoc

When developing the docs, building docs can be VERY slow locally because of the notebook tutorials. To speed this up, enable this flag in before building docs:

# builds notebooks which is slow
export PL_FAST_DOCS_DEV=0

# fast notebook build which is fast
export PL_FAST_DOCS_DEV=1

To change the CSS theme of the docs, go here. Apologies in advance... this is a bit complex to build and requires basic understanding of javascript/npm.