That exception might be the result of the refactoring. A common oversight is that when doing "from foo import *" does not import anything starting with an underscore unless explicitly put into foo.__all__. I wonder if this might be the case here?

Looks like the function in question was moved around in #2182, but I don't think those changes are in v1.3.x.

Did you install matplotlib v1.3 prior to trying to build the docs? Unlike the tests, sphinx works off of the installed version of matplotlib rather than an in-place build of it.

Yes, I've tried it with both this branch (installed using setup.py develop) and 1.3.0 from Anaconda.

I don't think setup.py develop will work -- you need to install to a virtualenv that sphinx will pick up. I keep meaning to get the build_sphinx command working, but at present it doesn't.

Alright, I got it working. There was a .pth file hanging around pointing to the wrong version of matplotlib. The html looks fine.