Panda3D Documentation

This repository contains the source code for the documentation of the Panda3D game engine.

The resulting documentation can be found at: https://docs.panda3d.org/

Building the Documentation

The documentation is built upon Sphinx, and several extensions are required. The easiest way to install Sphinx and the extensions into an existing Python installation is using pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

You can then build the manual in the desired format. For example, you can build it in the HTML format by executing this command in your command prompt:

make html

If the command was successful, the resulting documentation can be found in the _build/html folder. Other formats are also possible, such as make latexpdf for producing a .pdf file. Consult the Sphinx manual for other options.

On Windows, if you receive an error like the following:

The 'sphinx-build' command was not found. Make sure you have Sphinx
installed, then set the SPHINXBUILD environment variable to point
to the full path of the 'sphinx-build' executable. Alternatively you
may add the Sphinx directory to PATH.

It may be the case that your Python Scripts folder is not on the PATH. The easiest way to deal with this is by setting your SPHINXBUILD variable something like so (adjust for the location of your Python build):

set SPHINXBUILD=C:\Panda3D-1.10.15-x64\python\python.exe -m sphinx

Editing the Documentation

To make changes, simply edit the .rst files in a code editor and rerun the make html command to rebuild only the files that have changed.

To propose changes, push the changes to a local branch on a fork of the GitHub repository and open a Pull Request. For more information on how to do this, refer to this guide:

https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/#opening-a-pull-request

Coding Style

When editing the documentation, please try to conform to the following guidelines:

• Running text should be wrapped to an 80-character ruler. Many editors have a feature to do this automatically (eg. Alt+Q in Sublime Text). Code may exceed this, as long as it follows our code guidelines for the respective language, with a strict limit of 86 characters relative to the base indent of the code block (LaTeX starts wrapping code beyond that).
• Please configure your editor to strip extra spaces at the end of a line.
• Use a single blank newline at the end of each file.
• Indentation for ReStructuredText should be 3 spaces, except code blocks, which need to be indented to 4 spaces for Python code and 2 for C++.
• The manual exists mostly to explain concepts and should not become a cookbook for code examples. However, in a few cases it is helpful to have a complete code example listed. In this case, put it in a separate .py file and refer to it using a .. literalinclude:: block.
• When choosing a location for a new manual page, keep the filename concise, and try to avoid creating redundancy in the path. For example, prefer bullet/tutorial.rst over the-bullet-integration/bullet-tutorial.rst.
• Page titles should be underlined with ===, sections with ---, and finally, sub-sections with ^^^, and the underline should be as wide as the title.
• You can link to a class in the API reference using :class:`.NodePath` and to a method with :meth:`.NodePath.reparent_to()` if you want to include the class prefix, or :meth:`~.NodePath.reparent_to()` if you just want to show the name of the method, like reparent_to(). You can use custom text as well, like :meth:`myNodePath.reparentTo(render) <.NodePath.reparent_to>` .
• When removing a page, please edit the _static/redirects.json file to create a redirect to a page that contains similar content. There is nothing more frustrating to a user than having existing bookmarks, links from other sites, and links from Google turn up 404 pages. The redirect file is processed by a custom 404 handler on the server, so you need to really delete the page for the redirect to work. If there is no obvious redirect target (eg. if the page was split up into multiple pages), you can leave a disambiguation page marked with :orphan: on the first line.
• See the Python guide for more information.