Firstly, thanks to Michael Balzer for fixing my errors in the rst files I checked in. (Also, apparently I can't spell Auxiliary - doh). I _had_ tried to get sphinx working recently and failed miserably, so I tried again this morning. The problem is that ubuntu: * Doesn't provide a package for m2r2 or sphinx-mdinclude (a fork of m2r2) * No longer allows you to pip install into the main python library path So first I got rid of the installed sphinx-doc sudo apt remove sphinx-doc Then I set up a sphinx virtual environment pipx install sphinx pipx inject sphinx sphinx_rtd_theme docutils mistune requests sphinx-mdinclude For some reason I was getting run-time python errors with m2r2 which is why I tried switching to mdinclude. In docs/source/conf.py I changed extensions = [ 'm2r2' ] to be 'sphinx_mdinclude' instead of 'm2r2' The pipx command creates a virtual execution environment for sphinx and puts a shim for sphinx in your local path that runs it in the virtual environment. //.ichael