Documentation

Quick Fix

If you find a typo or a small error in the documentation you can easily fix it using GitHub.

  • Fork the repository
  • Go to [your GitHub username]/dataverse/doc/sphinx-guides/source and access the file you would like to fix
  • Switch to the branch that is currently under development
  • Click the Edit button in the upper-right corner and fix the error
  • Submit a pull request

Other Changes (Sphinx)

The documentation for Dataverse was written using Sphinx (http://sphinx-doc.org/). If you are interested in suggesting changes or updates we recommend that you create the html files using Sphinx locally and the submit a pull request through GitHub. Here are the instructions on how to proceed:

Installing Sphinx

On a Mac:

Download the sphinx zip file from http://sphinx-doc.org/install.html

Unzip it somewhere. In the unzipped directory, do the following as root, (sudo -i):

python setup.py build python setup.py install

Alternative option (Mac/Unix/Windows):

Unless you already have it, install pip (https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/installing.html)

run pip install sphinx in a terminal

This is all you need. You should now be able to build HTML/pdf documentation from git sources locally.

Using Sphinx

First, you will need to make a fork of the dataverse repository in GitHub. Then, you will need to make a clone of your fork so you can manipulate the files outside GitHub.

To edit the existing documentation go to ~/dataverse/doc/sphinx-guides/source directory inside your clone. There, you will find the .rst files that correspond to the guides in the dataverse page (http://guides.dataverse.org/en/latest/user/index.html). Now, using your preferred text editor, open and edit these files, or create new .rst files and edit the others accordingly.

Once you are done, open a terminal and change directories to ~/dataverse/doc/sphinx-guides . Then, run the following commands:

  • make clean
  • make html

After sphinx is done processing the files you should notice that the html folder in ~/dataverse/doc/sphinx-guides/build directory has been updated. You can click on the files in the html folder to preview the changes.

Now you can make a commit with the changes to your own fork in GitHub and submit a pull request to the dataverse repository.

Table of Contents

Every non-index page should use the following code to display a table of contents of internal sub-headings:

.. contents:: |toctitle|
        :local:

This code should be placed below any introductory text/images and directly above the first subheading, much like a Wikipedia page.


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