Docs

Requirements

To build the PDAL documentation yourself, you need to install the following items:

• Sphinx

• Breathe

• Doxygen

• Latex

• dvipng

Sphinx and Breathe

Python dependencies should be installed from PyPI with pip or easy_install.

(sudo) pip install sphinx sphinxconfig-bibtex breathe

Note

If you are installing these packages to a system-wide directory, you may need the sudo in front of the pip, though it might be better that instead you use virtual environments instead of installing the packages system-wide.

Doxygen

The PDAL documentation also depends on Doxygen, which can be installed from source or from binaries from the doxygen website. If you are on Max OS X and use homebrew, you can install doxygen with a simple brew install doxygen.

Latex

Latex and pdflatex are used to generate the companion PDF of the website.

dvipng

For math output, we depend on dvipng to turn Latex output into math PNGs.

Generation

Once you have installed all the doc dependencies, you can then build the documentation itself. The doc/ directory in the PDAL source tree contains a Makefile which can be used to build all documentation. For a list of the output formats supported by Sphinx, simply type make. For example, to build html documentation:

cd doc
make doxygen html

The html docs will be placed in doc/build/html/. The make doxygen is necessary to re-generate the API documentation from the source code using Breathe and Sphinx.

Note

For a full build of the C++ API documentation, you need to make doxygen to have it build its XML output which is consumed by Breathe before make html can be issued.

Website

The http://pdal.io website is regenerated from the *-maintenance branch using Github Actions. It will be committed by the PDAL-docs GitHub user and pushed to the PDAL/pdal.github.io repository. The website is then served via GitHub Pages.