qtgallery

Scraper for generating a sphinx-gallery of Qt windows.

This repository serves both as a library for grabbing renderings of Qt windows to add to your own sphinx-gallery config as well as an example of its usage.

Installation

qtgallery is available on PyPI, so it can be installed with pip:

$ pip install qtgallery

To try out the repository and get a feel for how it is configured, clone the repository and install a few extra requirements to build the documentation locally:

$ git clone git@github.com:ixjlyons/qtgallery.git
$ cd qtgallery/docs
$ pip install -r requirements
$ make html

Open up docs/_build/html/index.html to see built docs. They're currently being hosted by Read the Docs as well:

https://qtgallery.readthedocs.io/

Configuration

To use qtgallery in your own documentation, start by setting up a normal sphinx-gallery. Setting up a simple matplotlib example to get started might be a good idea.

Next, add qtgallery to extensions:

# sphinx conf.py
extensions = {
    ...
    'sphinx_gallery.gen_gallery',
    'qtgallery',
 }

Next, add the qtgallery image scraper and reset function to sphinx_gallery_conf as follows:

# sphinx conf.py
import qtgallery

sphinx_gallery_conf = {
    ...
    'image_scrapers': (qtgallery.qtscraper, ...),
    'reset_modules': (qtgallery.reset_qapp, ...),
}

The image scraper is responsible for generating a rendering of all currently shown top level windows.

The reset function is for handling QApplication, allowing you to instantiate the QApplication singleton in each example and preventing the Qt event loop from running and hanging the docs build. That is, examples that run ok standalone should behave ok in generating the gallery.

Display Configuration

qtgallery also has its own sphinx configuration variable (qtgallery_conf) for configuring the virtual display used. The defaults are listed below (also found in qtgallery/__init__.py). The values are passed along in constructing a PyVirtualDisplay Display:

# sphinx conf.py
qtgallery_conf = {
     "xvfb_size": (640, 480),
     "xvfb_color_depth": 24,
     "xfvb_use_xauth": False,
     "xfvb_extra_args": [],
 }

Usage

Usage pretty much follows sphinx-gallery, but one tip is that you can control where the window is rendered via show(). See the iterative example to see how this works.

Read the Docs

On Read the Docs, xvfb is required. See their documentation for installing apt packages. This repository also serves as an example (see .readthedocs.yml).