CAF.base happily accepts contributions.

The best way to contribute to this project is to go to the issues tab and report bugs or submit a feature request. This helps CAF.base become more stable and full-featured. Please check the closed bugs before submitting a bug report to see if your question has already been answered.

Please see our contribution guidelines for details on contributing to the codebase or documentation.

Documentation is created using Sphinx and is hosted online at cafbase.readthedocs.

The documentation can be built locally once all the docs requirements (docs/requirements.txt) are installed into your Python environment.

The provided make batch file, (inside the docs folder), allow for building the documentation in various target formats. The command for building the documentation is make {target} (called from within docs/), where {target} is the type of documentation format to build. A full list of all available target formats can be seen by running the make command without any arguments but the two most common are detailed below.

HTML

The HTML documentation (seen on Read the Docs) can be built using the make html command, this will build the web-based documentation and provide an index.html file as the homepage, docs/build/html/index.html.

PDF

The PDF documentation has some other requirements before it can be built as Sphinx will first build a LaTeX version of the documentation and then use an installed TeX distribution to build the PDF from those. If you already have a TeX distribution setup then you can build the PDF with make latexpdf, otherwise follow the instructions below.

Installing LaTeX on Windows is best done using MiKTeX, as this provides a simple way of handling any additional TeX packages. Details of other operating systems and TeX distributions can be found on the Getting LaTeX page on LaTeX's website.

MiKTeX provides an installer on its website miktex.org/download, which will run through the process of getting it installed and setup. In addition to MiKTeX the specific process Sphinx uses for building PDFs is Latexmk, which is a Perl script and so requires Perl to be installed on your machine, this can be done with an installer provided by Strawberry Perl.

Once MiKTex and Perl are installed you are able to build the PDF from the LaTeX files, Sphinx provides a target (latexpdf) which builds the LaTeX files then immediately builds the PDF. When running make latexpdf MiKTeX may ask for permission to installed some required TeX packages. Once the command has finished the PDF will be located at docs/build/latex/cafbase.pdf.