Building and Contributing to Documentation

As one might expect, the documentation for Read the Docs is built using Sphinx and hosted on Read the Docs. The docs are kept in the docs/ directory at the top of the source tree.

You can build the docs by installing Sphinx and running:

# in the docs directory
make html

Please follow these guidelines when updating our docs. Let us know if you have any questions or something isn’t clear.

The brand

We are called Read the Docs. The the is not capitalized.

We do however use the acronym RTD.

Titles

For page titles, or Heading1 as they are sometimes called, we use title-case.

If the page includes multiple sub-headings (H2, H3), we usually use sentence-case unless the titles include terminology that is supposed to be capitalized.

Content

  • Do not break the content across multiple lines at 80 characters, but rather break them on semantic meaning (e.g. periods or commas). Read more about this here.
  • If you are cross-referencing to a different page within our website, use the doc directive and not a hyperlink.