This continues #16893, which replaced help.txt with help.html for the Idle doc display.  It also replaced the display classes with new classes in help.py.  I currently create help.html in a .bat file.  With Doc as current directory, it uses
  ..\pcbuild\python_d.exe -c "from idlelib.help import copy_strip; copy_strip()"
With a change to the help.py if __name__ block so that
  ..\pcbuild\python_d.exe -m idlelib.help copy_strip
would work.

This issue is first about revising Zack Ware's makefile patch, https://bugs.python.org/file36975/issue16893-v4.diff, which adds an 'idledoc' target.  It is attached to #16893.  It needs 'copy' replaced by 'copy, strip, and rename'. The command above requires finding a compatible python.exe, and I do not know if that is a problem.

In normal use, 'idledoc' should only be invoked for the earliest 3.x getting maintenance patches, and the result merged forward.

If this is resolved, it would be nice if the new 'idledoc' target were built as apart of the release process, and any changes checked in.  But the latter should currently still be done for all 3.x branches

Zach, I currently build idlelib/help.html by first building a complete doc set and then copying from Doc/.../idle.html, stripping trailing whitespace on the say.  One problem is that the result has a lot of extraneous stuff aside from the doc text itself: the code for the header, sidebar, and footer. These are a nuisance when committing changes and for extracting just the text we want.

I would prefer to create a clean .html from Doc/library/idle.rst that just has the code for the doc, without the extraneous matter.  Do you know how?  I looked in Doc/make.bat and it says it will not work on single files.