Making a local copy of the EasySpin documentation

On release, the EasySpin documentation is automatically built from the the html files in the /docsrc/ folder.

If you change the documentation you might want to verify that your modifications were implemented correctly, especially if you added equations or other math. For this you will have to build the documentation locally (don't worry, the built documentation will not be added to the repository, as it is excluded through the .gitignore file).

Adding math in the documentation: If you want to include equations in the documentation you have to do so through the use of LaTeX markup, which will be automatically converted to a png file.

Requirements

In order to build the documentation you need to have perl and latex installed.

Windows:

• Install perl (e.g. get it from http://strawberryperl.com/)
• Verify perl is on the search path. To do so, open a terminal and run perl -v. If you get an error message, you probably need to add the installation path manually to the Windows path defintion (see here for how).
• Install LaTeX (e.g. from https://miktex.org/)
• Make sure it was correctly added to the search path by running pdftex -version. If you get an error message, add the directory that contains the LaTex files to the search path.

Unix system:

• Install perl with

  sudo apt install perl
  

• Install LaTeX with

  sudo apt install texlive-latex-extra
  sudo apt install latex2html
  

Building the documentation

Once you have made sure, that you have working versions of perl and LaTeX, open a terminal in the releasing folder. Then run:

perl docbuilder.pl

This will create the compiled version of the EasySpin documentation in the documentation folder.