Contributing Changes

The best way to contribute to the periodic table package is to work from a copy of the source tree in the revision control system.

The source is available via git at https://github.com/pkienzle/periodictable. To make changes, create a fork of the project on github, then do following, with your github user name substituted for GITNAME:

git clone https://github.com/GITNAME/periodictable.git
cd periodictable
python setup.py develop

By using the develop keyword on setup.py, changes to the files in the package are immediately available without the need to run setup.py install each time.

Track updates to the original package using:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/pkienzle/periodictable.git
git remote -v   # check that it is set
git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master

Please update the documentation and add tests for your changes. We use doctests on all of our examples that we know our documentation is correct. More thorough tests are found in test directory. Using the the nose test package, you can run both sets of tests:

pip install nose
python test.py

When all the tests run, create a pull request (PR) on the github page.

Windows user can use TortoiseGit package which provides similar operations.

You can build the documentation as follows:

pip install sphinx
(cd doc/sphinx && make clean html pdf)

You can see the result by pointing your browser to:

periodictable/doc/sphinx/_build/html/index.html
periodictable/doc/sphinx/_build/latex/PeriodicTable.pdf

ReStructured text format does not have a nice syntax for superscripts and subscripts. Units such as g·cm^-3 are entered using macros such as |g/cm^3| to hide the details. The complete list of macros is available in

doc/sphinx/rst_prolog

In addition to macros for units, we also define cdot, angstrom and degrees unicode characters here. The corresponding latex symbols are defined in doc/sphinx/conf.py.