Javadoc style python manual?

[Paul Boddie]

John J. Lee wrote:
>

[epydoc on the standard library]

> Why do you expect to get useful docs that way?  The canonical Python
> stdlib docs live in LaTeX files, not in the docstrings.  You may find
> some useful bits and pieces in the docstrings too, or you may not.

But wasn't the questioner recommended to use pydoc, help and so on? As
far as I am aware, none of those things look in LaTeX files in order to
provide the documentation that they do dig up. It turns out that pydoc
(in graphical mode) manages to permit introspection of the known
modules on a system in a more presentable fashion than epydoc, although
epydoc is visually much more like javadoc. Still, both tools rely on
docstrings and might be adequate for packages outside the standard
library - it's just a shame that the standard library doesn't lend
itself as greatly to such inspection (with optimal results).

As far as the means of delivering the library documentation is
concerned, my understanding was that the LaTeX format approach wasn't
encouraging as many improvements to the library documentation as was
expected or desired. This is possibly not that surprising given the
docstring-oriented approach I imagine most developers take with their
own API documentation (in Python and through mostly equivalent
mechanisms in other languages).

Paul