Read the Docs has been committed to improving the accessibility and user experience of Sphinx since the start, and that includes the markup language in which the documentation is written. Years ago, after carefully listening to users, we announced recommonmark to help bridging the immense popularity of Markdown with the powerful capabilities of Sphinx. (It is now deprecated in favor of MyST - keep reading to know more.)

It is no surprise that Markdown is in such demand: thanks in large part to the huge popularity of GitHub, Markdown is nowadays the most widely used markup language in open-source projects, ahead of reStructuredText, the second in the list, by an order of magnitude.

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We successfully deployed mitigation measures against spam, and we are happy to report that the amount of abusive projects has dramatically decreased.

We are thrilled to announce the availability of Read the Docs Embed API v3, along with its official client, sphinx-hoverxref 1.0. This work has been possible in part thanks to the the CZI grant we received.

As we wrote in our first blog post about sphinx-hoverxref, one of the most powerful features of Sphinx is the possibility of creating cross references to other documentation projects. However, a reader finding several links in a technical documentation might need to open several browser tabs to fully understand the context, resulting in a lot of friction in the form of context switching.

We are proud to announce that now Jupyter Book projects are supported on Read the Docs!

Both Read the Docs and The Executable Book Project, the folks behind Jupyter Book, share a common passion for documentation, and we have been collaborating on various topics for some time already. For example, we started promoting MyST in favor of our recommonmark back in April this year, and we wrote a guide on using Jupyter notebook with Sphinx that benefitted a lot from their feedback.

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

During the first week of November we attended the 2021 Essential Open Source Software for Science Annual Meeting, an event organized by the CZI Science team. We are thrilled to connect with projects in the Open Science ecosystem.

Starting about a week ago, some users started reporting new errors with their project builds. In most cases, these errors appeared out of nowhere and are usually rather cryptic errors referencing Sphinx and docutils.

So, what is happening?

We are excited to announce that now Read the Docs users can use a newer build specification in their projects that will change the base image to one based on Ubuntu 20.04, ship the recently released Python 3.10, and allow users to easily specify the version of Node.js, Rust, and Go. This feature has been a long time in the making, and we think it will simplify the configuration of many projects.

The Docker images used by our builders were based on Ubuntu 18.04. Recently, we added a new feature to install custom system packages, which allowed many projects to have better control of their build process without having to use conda to manage non-Python dependencies.

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We have resumed sending our blog updates by email. You can subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss them.

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We have published the first release candidate of version 1.0.0 of our Sphinx theme, which adds support for recent versions of Sphinx and docutils among other things, and announced our future plans for it. Check out the linked blog post to know more. Update: We have released 1.0 to PyPI

The 1.0.0 version of sphinx_rtd_theme was released Sept 13, 2021. You can install the latest version with:

Alternatively, you can upgrade the version installed using:

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We have a new team member! Ana just joined us as Frontend Developer in the context of the CZI grant we were awarded to work on our JavaScript documentation embedding client and the Read the Docs redesign and UX.

Welcome to a new edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

Eric presented the history of the company at the Upstream 2021 conference along with ideas for open source sustainability. You can read more about it in our recent blog post.

During the first half of 2021 several team members of Read the Docs have talked about the company in podcasts and online events. If you want to learn more about our company directly from the people that are a core part of it, and hear our thoughts on other topics like open source sustainability and developer advocacy, this blog post is for you.

Eric was the special guest of Sustain back in February, “a podcast about sustaining open source in the long haul”. Eric started by telling the story of how he and Anthony co-founded Read the Docs, talked about the Write the Docs community, described the challenges of launching EthicalAds in 2020, and discussed the opportunities of using ethical advertising to fund open source projects.

We have released version 0.6b1 of sphinx-hoverxref, a Sphinx extension that shows a content preview of a cross-reference.

This extension is an essential part of the work we are doing to improve interoperability of documentation in general, and scientific documentation in particular, thanks to the CZI grant we received last year.

Welcome to a new edition of our monthly newsletter, where we openly share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We applied to the next round of the CZI Essential Open Source Software for Science! Our proposal is even more ambitious than the previous one, and we are excited about the possibilities for our users if we get accepted. The funding would cover 2 years of work, starting in 2022.

We are thrilled to announce that now Read the Docs users can declare custom operating system packages in their project configuration that will get installed in our Ubuntu-based builders using apt. This has been a long awaited feature, and we think it will simplify the configuration of many projects, especially scientific ones.

The Ubuntu images used by our builders contain lots of preinstalled system packages that we ship to all the projects to make the most common use cases possible. This includes compilers, development headers of common libraries, and others.

Welcome to a new edition of our monthly newsletter, where we openly share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

The team keeps growing! Ra will join us next week to do account management for EthicalAds.

This is the first of our monthly newsletters, in which we would like to openly share with you the most relevant updates of Read the Docs, offer a summary of what new features we shipped to our users during the previous month, and share what things we will be focusing on in the near future.

We have a new colleague! Juan Luis will be working with us as Developer Advocate, with a focus on fulfilling the goals of the CZI grant we were awarded, improve our public facing documentation, and spread the word about our service.

2020 was a rough year for everyone, including our team. We managed to make it through, and continue to have 5 folks working full-time to make Read the Docs better for you.

We are going into 2021 with a new grant, which will require us to do some hiring. We also launched our EthicalAds network, which is bringing our approach to sustainability to the tech community as a whole.

We are excited to announce that our API v3 has reached a stable release, and is now available for all Read the Docs users. Since we announced the API v3 beta, we have been adding extra functionality and bug-fixing minor issues based on user feedback.

The new API v3 is not a fully replacement (yet!) of API v2, but we highly recommend using API v3 for all the new integrations. API v2 will be deprecated soon, though we don’t have a firm timeline for deprecation. We will alert users with our plans when we do.

Update: The migration was successful and the site has been fully restored as of 4PM PST.

We wanted to make you aware that on Friday, February 12th at 1pm PST (4pm EST, 21:00 UTC), Read the Docs Community (readthedocs.org) will be having a scheduled dashboard downtime of approximately 4 hours.

We’re excited to announce that Pull Request building is now available for all Read the Docs users. We have been working on this feature for over a year, and having it available for all our users is a major milestone.

This feature allows users to confirm documentation builds correctly for all of their commits, not just ones merged into branches that are activated on Read the Docs. This moves documentation into your continuous integration pipeline, and improves the workflow for everyone working on documentation.

Update: This maintenance window has concluded at 5:40 PM PST.

We wanted to make you aware that on Friday, February 5 at 5:00pm PST (8:00pm EST, Saturday 01:00 UTC), Read the Docs for Business (readthedocs.com) will be having a scheduled downtime of approximately 2 hours.

Read the Docs received a grant to support scientific software at the beginning of this year. As part of this, we are hiring for two new positions related to the grant work:

A frontend developer with design skills