The SciPy lecture notes are a community-based effort and require constant maintenance and improvements. New contributions such as wording improvements or inclusion of new topics are welcome.
The directory guide contains instructions on how to contribute:
Example chapter
.. toctree:: guide/index.rst
To generate the html output for on-screen display, Type:
make html
the generated html files can be found in build/html
The first build takes a long time, but information is cached and subsequent builds will be faster.
To generate the pdf file for printing:
make pdf
The pdf builder is a bit difficult and you might have some TeX errors.
Tweaking the layout in the *.rst files is usually enough to work
around these problems.
A complete list of requirements with information on the versions presently used to build the SciPy lecture notes, can be inferred from the :download:`requirements file <requirements.txt>`:
.. literalinclude:: requirements.txt
:start-after: # libraries before the special comment marked
The installation instructions below cover (i) Debian/Ubuntu with miniconda as this is the method we use to test and build the material and (ii) generic instructions using pip.
Building on Debian/Ubuntu
The environment needed to create an html version of the SciPy lecture notes
can be based on miniconda. We first download the latest version of miniconda
and rename it to miniconda.sh for simplicity:
wget https://repo.continuum.io/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh -O miniconda.sh
To ensure that the file has been downloaded correctly, one can compare the MD5 sum obtained by means of:
md5sum miniconda.sh
with the value listed on https://repo.continuum.io/miniconda/ . Miniconda can now be installed:
bash miniconda.sh
Review the license agreement and choose a target directory (here we assume it
to be $HOME/miniconda3). Unless you intend to work more extensively with
miniconda, you do not want to modify .bashrc. In this case, you need:
export PATH=$HOME/miniconda3/bin:$PATH
to find the correct binaries. Note that the path depends on the target directory chosen above.
Now, we use environment.yml from the main directory of the scipy-lecture-notes
repository to install the required dependencies. Note that environment.yml yields
an environment named testenv. If you prefer a more telling name, make a copy of
environment.yml, replace testenv in line 4 by a more appropriate name and use
this name in the following instead of testenv. The conda environment is created
by:
conda env create -f environment.yml
Now, the environment can be activated:
source activate testenv
and deactivated:
source deactivate
With an activated environment, you are now able to produce the html version of the
SciPy as explained above. Generating a pdf version requires the system packages
texlive, texlive-latex-extra, texlive-fonts-extra, and latexmk.
Installing the Python packages with pip
pip is the recommended tool to install Python packages. However, a number of packages must be installed from the system. Install Python, the Python "headers" (the python3-dev package on Debian, for instance), a C development environment, GNU Make, a full LaTeX distribution (e.g. TeX Live with extra fonts and utilities) and git.
The remaining software can be installed with pip. Depending on the configuration, the probably most convenient and safe way to proceed is with:
pip install --user -r requirements.txt
This will install the software in a local directory belonging to the user and will not interfere with system-wide Python packages.