A software development project often starts with a collection of documents describing the reasons for the project. These documents can be called inception documents because they describe the project at its inception. These documents may include memos and presentations justifying the project. They often describe the most essential user stories.

Ideally, these inception documents are already text files. Pragmatically, they're almost never text. Often, the inception document is a slideshow format, perhaps Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, or Google Slides. These documents mix text with diagrams, making them a challenge to work with.

The goal is to create a text file that can be part of the RST-based documentation. For example, many word processors can save a document as text. Some word processors can produce Markdown markup; this is easily converted to RST. In some cases, we might want to use a tool such as pandoc to extract RST markup from the original document. This lets us import the document into the project and work with it via the Sphinx tools. For more information on pandoc, refer to https://pandoc.org.

One of the difficult cases is a project where some of the inception documentation is a slideshow. The diagrams and images are first-class parts of the content and don't have handy text representations. In these cases, it's sometimes best to export the presentation as an HTML document and put this into the Sphinx doc/source/_static directory. This will allow us to integrate the original material into Sphinx via simple RST links of the `Inception <_static/inception_doc/index.html>`_ form.

In some cases, an interactive, web-based tool, such as Trello, is used to manage the project or user stories. In this case, the inception and background documentation can be handled via simple URL references of this form: `Background <http://someservice/path/to/page.html>`_.

In the next section, we'll see how to write the documentation.