On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 1:52 PM, Ben Gamari <bg...@gm...> wrote: > Any idea why my debugging messages are ineffective? Or, even better, any > idea why setting the examples.download in doc/matplotlibrc isn't being > reflected in rc_params? I'll examine this more closely in about 30 > minutes once I make it to the office. I am not sure. Perhaps it is working but in the confusion you never had everything set right at the same time. Try setting in doc/matplotlibrc examples.download : False examples.directory : somedir/relative/to/doc Then flush the sphinx build directory and try again. Perhaps stick some debug print in matplotlib.matplotlib_fname and cbook.get_sample_data and let us know. Good luck! JDH