How do I generate RTD documentation for offline reading?

Question

Is there any convenient way to read & access the project-documentation of a Python packages - f.e. like a ReadTheDocs-documentation (https://beautiful-soup-4.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ for bs4 in this case)- offline?

I know that there is a pydoc-server, docstrings and so on. However, these do not include the full documentation like tutorials, quickstarts etc. Is there an equivalent feature in Python like the vignettes in R?

Answer 1

Documentation on RtD is generated using Sphinx. Larger Python packages will have the files required to generate this documentation in their source archive and usually available via make doc or in a specific format via e.g. make html or make pdf. For BS4 specifically, the makefile is under docs/, and running make help will show which further targets are available.