Sphinx - documentation system
Name
Purpose
Sphinx satisfies a need for good documentation, with tables of contents, indices, and multiple output formats.
Summary of your evaluation
Although there can be a bit of a learning curve regarding reStructuredText (reST), the quality of the output produced is fantastic! It's now what drives much of the Read The Docs web site.
Description
Wikipedia describes Sphinx as
"a documentation generator written and used by the Python community. It is written in Python, and also used in other environments"
It produces beautiful paginated web sites and PDFs. It also produces output in EPUB format and a few others formats as well, though I've only generated HTML and PDF.
Pros and cons
Pros
- open source
- written in Python (yay! Python!
😉 ) - easy to install
- beautiful output right out of the gate, with no tweaking!
- multiple "themes" offered to customize the styling of the output
- automatic table of contents, index, and search engine generation
Cons
- a learning curve, both with reStructuredText (reST) and the application itself -- though I didn't consider it to be terribly steep.
- some limitations, for example multi-column output, require tweaking
- tweaking the generated PDF requires knowledge of LaTeX
- tweaking the generated HTML requires an understanding of CSS
Indications of maturity level
According to Wikipedia "reST began to see significant use in the Python community in 2002", and Sphinx's "first public release, version 0.1.61611, was announced on March 21, 2008".