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My question is: How can I use my up to date pandas installation to build the pandas documentation?

I read the pandas/doc/README.rst, which says to navigate to the pandas/doc directory and run python make.py html. Unfortunately, this does not work for me as it seems to require having first done an inplace build of pandas. My (windows) computer does not have the necessary prerequisites for doing a development build, and it seems to be an unnecessary burden when I just want to add some notes that improve the documentation.

The background for why I am asking this question is that earlier this week I posted a SO question about pandas hdf5 output. In discussing the answer with Jeff, he encouraged me to add some commentary to the documentation. So I forked the pandas repository and began to think about how I would add to the documentation. I am not interested in setting up a development build of the complete pandas installation. I would like to be able to modify the documentation, build it, and see my changes before submitting a pull request. Is there a reasonable way to do this?

Thanks!

Community
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Phil
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  • Shouldn't this be something you post on [`github`](https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues) rather than SO? – EdChum Jun 12 '15 at 15:51
  • I am sometimes unsure what to post where. I thought this was a general pandas question about how to contribute to pandas documentation so it should go on SO. Now that I have seen this is a bug (or undocumented feature--see my comment below), I made an [issue on github](https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/10340). – Phil Jun 12 '15 at 16:35

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Here are the pandas contributing guidelines & howto's.

Jeff
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  • I had seen that. I discovered the problem I have is that the ``make.py`` script has the statement ``os.environ['PYTHONPATH'] = '..'``, which seems to force python to get pandas from the source tree. I commented out that line and now the error I was getting with ``python make.py html`` seems to have gone away and the html documentation is generated. I will forge ahead with adding my 2 cents to the documentation. – Phil Jun 12 '15 at 16:21