This pull request introduces multiple enhancements, updates, and fixes across the project, focusing on improving Python version support, documentation, workflows, and configuration files. Below is a categorized summary of the most important changes:

Python Version and Dependency Updates:

• Updated the Dockerfile to use Python 3.13 instead of 3.9.
• Added support for Python 3.10, 3.11, and 3.12 in .travis.yml.

Documentation Improvements:

• Introduced a new pyproject.toml file for project metadata and dependency management, aligning with modern Python packaging standards.
• Enhanced README.rst and index.rst files with better formatting, updated links, and clearer instructions. [1] [2]
• Added functionality in scripts/apidoc.py to convert README.md to README.rst using Pandoc and synchronize it with index.rst. [1] [2]

Workflow Updates:

• Updated GitHub Actions workflows (cleanup.yml and python-package.yml) to use actions/checkout@v4 for better compatibility and performance. [1] [2]

Sphinx Configuration Enhancements:

• Refactored docs/source/conf.py to dynamically load project metadata from a __version__.py file and added utilities for determining the module name.
• Replaced sphinxcontrib.napoleon with sphinx.ext.napoleon for better compatibility.

Testing Configuration:

• Overhauled pytest.ini to include additional settings for test discovery, logging, and coverage reporting, while introducing stricter plugin requirements.