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+=========================================
+Building the NumPy API and reference docs
+=========================================
+
+We currently use Sphinx_ for generating the API and reference
+documentation for NumPy.  You will need Sphinx 1.0.1 or newer.
+
+If you only want to get the documentation, note that pre-built
+versions can be found at
+
+    http://docs.scipy.org/
+
+in several different formats.
+
+.. _Sphinx: http://sphinx.pocoo.org
+
+
+Instructions
+------------
+
+If you obtained NumPy via git, get also the git submodules that contain
+additional parts required for building the documentation::
+
+    git submodule init
+    git submodule update
+
+In addition, building the documentation requires the Sphinx extension
+`plot_directive`, which is shipped with Matplotlib_. This Sphinx extension can
+be installed with or without completely installing Matplotlib: see the
+Matplotlib documentation for more information.
+
+Since large parts of the main documentation are stored in
+docstrings, you will need to first build NumPy, and install it so
+that the correct version is imported by
+
+    >>> import numpy
+
+Note that you can eg. install NumPy to a temporary location and set
+the PYTHONPATH environment variable appropriately.
+
+After NumPy is installed, write::
+
+    make html
+
+in the ``doc/`` directory. If all goes well, this will generate a
+``build/html`` subdirectory containing the built documentation. Note
+that building the documentation on Windows is currently not actively
+supported, though it should be possible. (See Sphinx_ documentation
+for more information.)
+
+To build the PDF documentation, do instead::
+
+   make latex
+   make -C build/latex all-pdf
+
+You will need to have Latex installed for this.
+
+Instead of the above, you can also do::
+
+   make dist
+
+which will rebuild NumPy, install it to a temporary location, and
+build the documentation in all formats. This will most likely again
+only work on Unix platforms.
+
+The documentation for NumPy distributed at http://docs.scipy.org in html and
+pdf format is also built with ``make dist``.  See `HOWTO RELEASE`_ for details on
+how to update http://docs.scipy.org.
+
+.. _Matplotlib: http://matplotlib.org/
+.. _HOWTO RELEASE: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/doc/HOWTO_RELEASE.rst.txt
+
+Sphinx extensions
+-----------------
+
+NumPy's documentation uses several custom extensions to Sphinx.  These
+are shipped in the ``sphinxext/`` directory (as git submodules, as discussed
+above), and are automatically enabled when building NumPy's documentation.
+
+If you want to make use of these extensions in third-party
+projects, they are available on PyPi_ as the numpydoc_ package.
+
+.. _PyPi: http://python.org/pypi
+.. _numpydoc: http://python.org/pypi/numpydoc