Read the Docs, community-supported service to create online documentation for software projects, has launched Pydoc. The new service is aimed to automate the API reference documentation for packages uploaded on Python Package Index (PyPI).
While other popular languages like Go and Ruby have API documentation site, Python developers can now enjoy the same using Pydoc. The service helps with high-level user documentation for any Python project and generates readable material at the behest of project owners, instead of using project source.
Open source Pydoc is built on Sphinx and uses sphinx-autoapi to convert Python source files into rST. There is also Django application pydoc.io that comes as a web front-end and documentation building code.
It is worth noting that Pydoc supports only those packages that are hosted in PyPI. It uses the algorithm to phrase the source code in Sphinx documentation generation engine and bring a browsable as well as tree formatted index of all APIs in the package if the source code has inline documentation. Moreover, the reference documentation generated by Pydoc is simple to navigate and understand the internals of code.
The beta release of Pydoc is now available for access. It presently supports a limited set of packages. However. Read the Docs is in plans to expanding the tool to automatically support the documentation generation for any package posted on PyPI.
