sphinx VS mkdocstrings

Sphinx is primarily known as a documentation generator, but it can also be used to create static websites. It excels in generating technical documentation, and its support for multiple output formats, including HTML and PDF, makes it a versatile tool. Sphinx uses reStructuredText for content creation and is highly extensible through plugins.

Sphinx a documentation generator or a tool that translates a set of plain text source files into various output formats, automatically producing cross-references, indices, etc. That is, if you have a directory containing a bunch of reStructuredText or Markdown documents, Sphinx can generate a series of HTML files, a PDF file (via LaTeX), man pages and much more.

Notable mentions to [Sphinx](https://www.sphinx-doc.org/). It's workflow is more tuned to the "book" format rather than the blog, forum or thread format.

Currently trying out Sphinx (https://www.sphinx-doc.org) and the trying to get the autodocgen feature to see what that can do.

So, I've documented my code and now I need a .PDF with this documentation. Is there any easy way to do it? Once I used Sphinx but it generated a not so easy .TeX.

AutoPyTabs allows you to write code examples in your documentation targeting a single version of Python and then generates examples targeting higher Python versions on the fly, presenting them in tabs, using popular tabs extensions. This all comes packaged as a markdown extension, MkDocs plugin and a Sphinx, so it can easily be integrated with your documentation workflow.

Honestly, I think it's just an issue of documentation. For example, if there was an easier way to document @overload functions, that would help (cf. https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/issues/7787)

We use sphynx for our pipeline documentation for all technical details Classes , packages and functions docstrings using reStructuredText (reST) format

I like Sphinx [0] with the MyST Markdown syntax [1]. There is a related project, Myst NB [2], which enables including Jupyter notebooks in your site. There is also a plugin for blogging [3].

[0]: https://www.sphinx-doc.org

Sphinx is the go-to tool for documentation. It took me a while to understand how to use Sphinx, but I now have a decent workflow with MyST which allows me to write all the docs in markdown. My sphinx-markdown-docs repo shows an example of what I do.

Mkdocs has the mkdocstrings plugin, offering limited automated API documentation capabilities. It is however nowhere near as capable as Sphinx' autodoc, missing granularity in its configuration, limited intersphinx-like cross-referencing support, and essential features like documentation of inherited members, or the ability to manually describe objects if needed.

mkdocstrings works well, although it is not as powerful as the API documentation in Sphinx.

Author of Materia for MkDocs here. MkDocstrings [1] implements automatic generation of reference documentation from sources. It's language-agnostic, actively maintained and currently supports Python [2] and Crystal [3]. It also integrates nicely with Material for MkDocs.

[1]: https://mkdocstrings.github.io/

Some time has passed since I first introduced mkdocstrings here on reddit. If you don't know what mkdocstrings is: it's the equivalent of the autodoc Sphinx extension, but for MkDocs, a Markdown static site generator. It works differently though, and supports multiple languages by design (not only Python). Someone actually wrote a very good handler for the Crystal language, and another user on GitHub recently expressed their interest for writing one for Go.

Write proper docstrings as you go along (every time you write a new class/method/function you can document what it’s doing as you’ll know why and what from the pattern you chose). Using a tool like mkdocstrings makes maintaining documentation for larger projects automatic.

I learned of https://github.com/pawamoy/mkdocstrings recently. Is it similar ?

A user of mkdocstrings wrote a Crystal handler for their own use-case. They asked on the Gitter channel if we could allow to load external handlers, so they don't have to fork the project and install the fork, but rather just install their lightweight package containing just the handler.