Building the documentation

The Mitsuba documentation is generated using Sphinx. It takes several steps to build the documentation from scratch, but only the last step will be necessary in most cases.

From the build folder, one can run the following commands:

ninja docstrings:

Generate the include/python/docstr.h file from the C++ headers. This file is used by pybind11 to add docstrings to the Python bindings.

Note

This step is only necessary if documentation/comments have changed in the header files (in which case the python bindings will need to be built again after calling this).

ninja mkdoc-api:

Extract documentation (classes, functions, of both Python & C++ portions) of the scalar_rgb variant using Autodoc to generate generate API reference documentation (stored in extracted_rst_api.rst, core_api.rst, render_api.rst and python_api.rst).

Note

This step is only necessary if documentation/comments have changed in the header files.

ninja mkdoc:

Generate the final HTML documentation including the extracted API and plugin documentation. The output will be stored in the html subdirectory.