Just tried building the docs for the tip of the v1.3.x branch, and it errors out fairly quickly with some sort of ascii codec error. This is for python 2.7 on ubuntu 12.04.
ben@…965…:~/Programs/matplotlib/doc$ python make.py html
Running Sphinx v1.2b1
Initializing GitHub plugin
loading pickled environment… not yet created
[autosummary] generating autosummary for: api/afm_api.rst, api/animation_api.rst, api/api_changes.rst, api/artist_api.rst, api/axes_api.rst, api/axis_api.rst, api/backend_bases_api.rst, api/backend_gtkagg_api.rst, api/backend_pdf_api.rst, api/backend_qt4agg_api.rst, …, users/pyplot_tutorial.rst, users/recipes.rst, users/screenshots.rst, users/shell.rst, users/text_intro.rst, users/text_props.rst, users/tight_layout_guide.rst, users/transforms_tutorial.rst, users/usetex.rst, users/whats_new.rst
animation, api, axes_grid, color, event_handling, images_contours_and_fields, lines_bars_and_markers, misc, mplot3d, old_animation, pie_and_polar_charts, pylab_examples, shapes_and_collections, showcase, specialty_plots, statistics, subplots_axes_and_figures, tests, text_labels_and_annotations, ticks_and_spines, units, user_interfaces, widgets,
building [html]: targets for 111 source files that are out of date
updating environment: 587 added, 0 changed, 0 removed
reading sources… [ 0%] api/artist_api
Sphinx error:
‘ascii’ codec can’t encode character u’\xe9’ in position 168: ordinal not in range(128)
Building HTML failed.