Newbie can't figure out documentation practices

[Antonios Christofides]

Hi, I'm slowly switching from Perl to Python, and I'm totally confused
about the user documentation practices used in Python.  I found a number
of discussions in the archives, but no clear answer, and very few
downloadable scripts I found include documentation material.

I have a script and want to document it. As an example, here's a
documented hello world in Perl:

    #!/usr/bin/perl

    =head1 NAME

    hello - display a hello world message

    =head1 SYNOPSIS

    hello

    =head1 DESCRIPTION

    hello greets the world.

    =cut

    print "Hello, world!\n";

I don't understand how I am supposed to do this in Python. I know I can
write documentation strings, but is there any command that can read them
and format them into something like a man page or even plain text? I
thought it would be pydoc, but it doesn't seem to work like perldoc. I'm
almost concluding there's no standard way, and people are choosing
whatever they like, e.g. pod, groff, DocBook, or LaTeX. No problem with
that, I just want to make sure my conclusion is correct.

Thanks for answering.