Documenting Your Open Source Project with Sphinx

Session Type: 
Tech Session
Presenter(s): 
Howard Butler, Hobu, Inc.
Jeff McKenna, Gateway Geomatics

The MapServer project recently embarked on a project to reconfigure its nearly 750 page documentation library to use the Sphinx documentation system. Sphinx is a project by Georg Brandl that was originally used to document the Python project, and has developed into a substantial project all its own. Sphinx boasts fantastic features like multiple output generation (HTML, ePub, LaTex, PDF, man), simple input with reStructuredText, document indexing, and code markup. This talk will describe the challenges that MapServer has faced moving to this system along with the improvement in project quality that resulted by migrating to this system.

Speaker Bio: 

Howard Butler is the president of Hobu, Inc. and has been active in numerous OSGeo projects including GDAL and MapServer.  He is a past member of the OSGeo Board of Directors and is currently developing Open Source LiDAR tools in the form of the libPC (http://libpc.org) and libLAS (http://liblas.org) libraries.

Jeff McKenna is the president of Gateway Geomatics that offers consulting services in Open Source Geospatial Software.  Jeff is a current member of the OSGeo Board of Directors, is the FOSS4G conference chair, and is active in the MapServer OSGeo software project. 

Schedule info

Time slot: 
Thu, 09/15/2011 - 11:00am - 11:30am
Room: 
Denver