need help with sphinx and LaTeX

Originally posted Aug 2, 2008 · Updated Jun 4, 2022 · 1 min read

Dear Lazy Web,

I’ve started using sphinx to produce some documentation at work. The HTML output looks good, and I have the templating system figured out so I can change it to look the way we want. We also want to produce a PDF, and that’s where I’m stuck. It looks like I need to go through LaTeX, then convert that to PDF. I’m a complete neophyte when it comes to TeX, though, so I’m not even sure where to start.

When I search for things like “converting TeX to PDF”, I find some old posts (c. 2005) about how some tools use bitmapped fonts and “look terrible” or vague instructions like “Convert your TeX file to dvi in the usual way.” I don’t have a usual way, yet, though so that doesn’t help me.

Can someone suggest a useful reference manual or starting point for me for using LaTeX under Linux?

I don’t actually care about LaTeX, so if there’s some other way to get nice looking PDF output from a Sphinx document tree, that information would be helpful, too.

Thanks in advance!