Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation for Python projects, written by Georg Brandl and licensed under the BSD license.

It was originally created to translate the new Python documentation, but has now been cleaned up in the hope that it will be useful to many other projects.

Although it is still under constant development, the following features are already present, work fine and can be seen “in action” in the Python docs:

* Output formats: HTML (including Windows HTML Help) and LaTeX, for printable PDF versions
* Extensive cross-references: semantic markup and automatic links for functions, classes, glossary terms and similar pieces of information
* Hierarchical structure: easy definition of a document tree, with automatic links to siblings, parents and children
* Automatic indices: general index as well as a module index
* Code handling: automatic highlighting using the Pygments highlighter
* Extensions: automatic testing of code snippets, inclusion of docstrings from Python modules, and more

Sphinx uses reStructuredText as its markup language, and many of its strengths come from the power and straightforwardness of reStructuredText and its parsing and translating suite, the Docutils.