The PyQt documentation is created from four sources:

• the fixed documentation found in the docs directory
• the .sip files for the version of PyQt being documented
• the Qt source code containing the documentation of the C++ API
• handwritten ports to Python of the Qt documentation (in the descriptions directory) and code snippets (in the snippets directory).

The system is designed so that it can be safely re-based for new versions of PyQt and Qt (separately and together) without losing any of the handwritten ports.

To build the HTML documentation, run the following command:

sphinx-build docs html

The documentation can be found in the html directory.

If the minor version of PyQt has changed then the conf.py file in the docs directory should be updated with the X.Y version number of the new PyQt version.

For each PyQt module (e.g. QtCore), run the following command:

python sip2rst.py MODULE

MODULE is the fully qualified name of the module, e.g. PyQt6.QtCore.

This will update the files in the api sub-directory of the docs directory.

The above command assumes that the PyQt .sip files have been installed in their default location. sip2rst.py has command line options to override the default locations if necessary.

To update the descriptions of the PyQt API in the descriptions directory for a new version of Qt, run the following command:

python webxml2rst.py --package PyQt6 --qt-prefix PREFIX

PREFIX is the name of the prefix directory if the Qt installation (i.e. the architecture-specific directory containing the bin, include and lib directories).

This will not overwrite any hand-written changes to the descriptions.

This will also update any code snippets and images for updated descriptions.

The snippets directory contains Python code snippets that are initially created from the original C++ code snippets by converting each line to a Python comment.

The snippets are included in the documetation by the use of literalinclude directives in the description files. The :lines: field is used to select specific parts of the snippet. The Qt documentation refers to embedded markers in order to select specific parts and these are retained (but unused) in the Python version. Their format is # #! [marker].

The code snippets can be modified in any way, including renaming the file, so long as appropriate changes are also made to any description file that includes them. A code snippet file may be included by more than one description file. If a code snippet is modified then the :status: field of any description file must not be todo to prevent the code snippet being overwritten when re-basing for a new version of Qt.