Build documentation

The main documentation and Python documentation is written in reStructuredText and generated by sphinx. The C++ API documentation is generated by Doxygen.

Documentation can be built on Ubuntu or macOS. Building documentation on Windows may also be possible but is not officially tested.

If you’re building documentation on a computer without a display, please use Headless rendering, otherwise the Jupyter tutorials will fail to execute.

Install system dependencies

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get -y install doxygen texlive texlive-latex-extra ghostscript pandoc

macOS

First, install a TeX distribution such as MacTeX.

brew install ghostscript pandoc doxygen

Building C++ documentation

If you only want to build C++ API documentation, clone the Open3D repo and run doxygen.

git clone https://github.com/isl-org/open3d
cd open3d/docs
doxygen Doxyfile.in

Start browsing the generated C++ API documentation from the file docs/doxygen/html/index.html. Read on if you want to build the full documentation (including Python API and tutorials).

Install or Build Open3D

pip install open3d

To instead build Open3D from source, see Build from source.

Install Python dependencies

pip install -r docs/requirements.txt

Build docs

cd docs

# Run `python make_docs.py --help` to usage of the flags.
python make_docs.py --help

# Example: build .rst and C++ docs only, skip notebooks.
python make_docs.py --execute_notebooks=never --sphinx --doxygen

# Example: build .rst and C++ docs only, skip notebooks, with parallel build.
python make_docs.py --execute_notebooks=never --sphinx --doxygen --parallel

# Example: build .rst and c++ docs, execute notebooks when it has not been executed.
python make_docs.py --execute_notebooks=auto --sphinx --doxygen

The docs html will be saved in docs/_out folder.

Preview

Open docs/_out/html/index.html in a web browser to preview the docs.

google-chrome docs/_out/html/index.html