The manual of VisIt's Python interface is written in LaTeX.
The manual is a combination of instructions of how to use the CLI and
function-by-function documentation.
The function-by-function documentation is extracted using a Python script.
This script imports VisIt and gets the online documentation for each method.
It then creates LaTeX for that documentation.

If you want to re-generate that documentation, you do something like:
MANUALDIR=/path/to/PythonManual
cd /path/to/visit/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$PWD
python < $MANUALDIR/doc_extractor.py > $MANUALDIR/VisItPythonManual.tex
cd $MANUALDIR
make

Of course, you should diff the old version of VisItPythonManual.tex with the
new one and make sure all functions and attributes got exported properly.

Two important notes:

(1) doc_extractor.py needs to have the site-package for VisIt in its path.
You need to modify the script to tell VisIt where this is.

You will see this as:
sys.path.insert(0, "Applications/VisIt.app/Contents/Resources/2.5.2/darwin-i386/lib/site-packages")

For my Mac at V2.5.2.  

Search for the comment "SET UP SCRIPT SO IT CAN RUN ON YOUR MACHINE" to find
the location to modify in the script.

Summarizing, when updating for a new version of VisIt, you should manually change the
version is doc_extractor.py.

(2) VisItPythonManual.tex is generated by doc_extractor.py.  Do NOT modify
this file directly.  If you want to change the LaTeX contents, modify
doc_extractor.py.

