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Compiled Help Files

Django docs in chm format

Here are links to windows compiled HTML help files of the django documentation for various releases of django.

Django development version documentation (svn trunk)

Django 1.3 documentation

Django 1.2.5 documentation

Django 1.1.4 documentation

Django 1.0.4 documentation

It may be necessary to unblock the chm file after downloading in order to view its contents.

How to compile django docs to chm

Here are detailed instructions for building the chm files.

  1. You must have Python and Sphinx installed.

    For django versions 1.0.x and 1.1.x, you must to install sphinx from source.

    hg clone http://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/
    cd sphinx
    hg up -q -r 1689
    python setup.py install

    If you don't have mercurial installed, use one of the links below:

    For later django versions, use sphinx 1.0 or later:

    easy_install sphinx
  2. Download and install the HTML Help compiler
  3. Download and install django. Installing django is necessary for building the docs for versions 1.2 or higher.
  4. Create the following directories in the django source tree:

    docs/_build/doctrees
    docs/_build/htmlhelp
  5. Delete script tags from the html template (django version 1.1 or higher).

    For django versions 1.2 and higher, this lives at docs/_theme/djangodocs/layout.html. In earlier versions, it's location is docs/_templates/layout.html.

    Look for the following section and delete it:

    {% block extrahead %}
    {{ super() }}
    <script type="text/javascript" src="{{ pathto('templatebuiltins.js', 1)
        }}"></script>
     ...
    })(jQuery);
    </script>
    {% endblock %}
  6. Open a command prompt, cd into the docs directory and run sphinx:

    sphinx-build -b htmlhelp -d _build/doctrees . _build/htmlhelp

    This generates the html which will be compiled into the chm file.

    By default the Last updated field which appears on every page will be set to the current date at the time the docs are built. Add an extra parameter -A last_updated="May 14, 2010" to set this to an earlier date. (You can find the date of last update easily by browsing the django source code.)

  7. To compile the chm file, double-click Djangodoc.hhp and click the compile button.