The standard documentation included with Python makes no use of diagrams or images; this is intentional. The outside tools used to format the documentation have not always been suited to working with graphics. As the tools have evolved and been improved by their maintainers, support for graphics has improved.
The internal tools, starting with the mkhowto script, do not provide any direct support for graphics. However, mkhowto will not interfere with graphics support in the external tools.
Experience using graphics together with these tools and the
howto
and manual
document classes is not extensive,
but has been known to work. The basic approach is this:
graphicx
:
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{figure} \centering \includegraphics[width=5in]{myimage} \caption{Description of my image} \end{figure}
In particular, note for the \includegraphics macro that no file extension is provided. If you're only interested in one target format, you can include the extension of the appropriate input file, but to allow support for multiple formats, omitting the extension makes life easier.
If you're working on systems which support some sort of make facility, you can use that to ensure the intermediate graphic formats are kept up to date. This example shows a Makefile used to format a document containing a diagram created using the dia application:
default: pdf all: html pdf ps html: mydoc/mydoc.php pdf: mydoc.pdf ps: mydoc.ps mydoc/mydoc.php: mydoc.tex mygraphic.eps mkhowto --html $< mydoc.pdf: mydoc.tex mygraphic.pdf mkhowto --pdf $< mydoc.ps: mydoc.tex mygraphic.eps mkhowto --postscript $< .SUFFIXES: .dia .eps .pdf .dia.eps: dia --nosplash --export $@ $< .eps.pdf: epstopdf $<
See About this document... for information on suggesting changes.