Mind Dump, Tech And Life Blog
written by Ivan Alenko
published under license CC-BY
posted in category Systems Software / Sphinx
posted at 23. Apr '25

Howto Generate ePub from Sphinx Documentation

Sometimes there is online documentation of a software, but there is not any ePub format to download. Which sucks, because I need to read manuals in silent and preferably in a laying position putting it in my phone or ebook reader.

Like LibreCAD documentation https://docs.librecad.org/en/2.2.0_a/.

Fortunately the documentation uses Sphinx written in Python and I was able to generate it myself.

Install Sphinx:

apt-get install python3-sphinx sphinx-doc sphinx-common

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/LibreCAD/docs

Generate ePub file:

cd docs
make epub
Running Sphinx v8.1.3
loading translations [en]... done
Converting `source_suffix = ['.rst', '.md']` to `source_suffix = {'.rst': 'restructuredtext', '.md': 'restructuredtext'}`.
loading pickled environment... done
building [mo]: targets for 0 po files that are out of date
writing output... 
building [epub]: targets for 0 source files that are out of date
updating environment: 0 added, 0 changed, 0 removed
reading sources... 
looking for now-outdated files... none found
no targets are out of date.
build succeeded.

The ePub file is in _build/epub.

And the ePub file is in _build/epub/LibreCAD.epub.

Fortunately this went quite easily.

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