Frequently Asked Questions

Why?

pydoctor was written to be used by the Twisted project which was using epydoc but was becoming increasingly unhappy with it for various reasons. In addition, development on Epydoc seemed to have halted.

The needs of the Twisted project are still the main driving force for pydoctor’s development, but it is getting to the point where there’s some chance that it is useful for your project too.

Who wrote pydoctor?

Michael “mwhudson” Hudson, PyPy, Launchpad and sometimes Twisted hacker, with help from Christopher “radix” Armstrong and Jonathan “jml” Lange and advice and ideas from many people who hang out in #twisted on freenode.

More recently, Maarten ter Huurne (“mth”), took the lead. Always backed with numerous contributors.

Why would I use it?

pydoctor is probably best suited to documenting a library that have some degree of internal subclassing.

It also has support for zope.interface, and can recognize interfaces and classes which implement such interfaces.

How is it different from sphinx-autodoc

sphinx-autodoc can be complex and the output is sometimes overwhelming, pydoctor will generate one page per class, module and package, it tries to keeps it simple and present information in a efficient way with tables.

Sphinx narrative documentation can seamlessly link to API documentation formatted by pydoctor. Please refer to the Sphinx Integration section for details.

What does the output look like?

It looks like this, which is the Twisted API documentation.

The output is reasonably simple.

Who is using pydoctor?

Here are some projects using pydoctor:

How do I use it?

Please review the Quick Start section.