Ask HN: documentation format?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136926

by binglo • 18 years ago

6 15 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

You need to write a manual that's more than a few pages. Maybe you'd like to be able to provide the client/customer/community with html as well as pdf. What format do you use, and why?

jakewolf• 18 years ago

Something formatted for 8.5" x 11" paper for printing out as a pdf and easy to navigate/search html.

How long are we really talking about?

binglo6• 18 years ago

I find that a plain text file longer than about a dozen pages in a terminal window -- containing more than a handful of sections and subsections -- becomes a pain in the neck to efficiently navigate around (during both reading and writing). A non-technical person might be reading such a document using Notepad.

So, we're talking about a doc that's getting a little too cramped being just a plain text file, and which might grow longer as time goes by.

wallflower• 18 years ago

The writers at my company use Framemaker - it's pretty industry standard and expensive. They have started writing the documents using DITA. It's pretty powerful.

DITA is an emerging documentation standard. It uses XML to describe the content and structure of a document. If you write your documentation in DITA XML, you can render it to PDF or online help easily. Yes, DITA is a little verbose.

http://dita.xml.org/getting-started

bugmenot• 18 years ago

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/ is quite nice: A rich set of features, easily extensible by custom directives, Python, and a hell lot of export formats (LaTeX/PDF, HTML, S5 slideshows, ...).

binglo6• 18 years ago

That's quite nice. Still not sure how I feel about wiki-style plain text markup formats though. I like them for simple and short docs, emails, and README's because it looks good in the editor, but it seems like the more you ask from that sort of format, the weirder things begin to look as you add features to support writing larger docs (and you end up with more syntax to memorize as well).

Thanks for the heads-up.

dfranke• 18 years ago

Docbook.

binglo6• 18 years ago

Why do you use docbook?

crystalarchives• 18 years ago

Depends on the type of documentation, but I'm a fan of LaTeX since there are so many tex2____ programs out there that'll convert LaTeX to whatever format you want.

The learning curve is steeper but the flexibility is high.

binglo6• 18 years ago

Definitely beautiful pdf output, but I was never happy with the available "latex2html" converters.

Bonus for being able to render mathematics in your docs.

Edit -- Also, I agree with you about the learning curve. Although it's very easy to get good-looking docs if you use one of the canned documentclasses and built-in commands, once you start to stray from those you're in deep water very quickly.

chaostheory2• 18 years ago

there's an open source format (not software) that is pretty comprehesive (though at times repetitive): http://readyset.tigris.org/

binglo6• 18 years ago

Those seem to just be a collection of html files where you can edit them and fill in the blanks. I guess if you like having your docs in raw html, it could be useful for those who have a hard time choosing where to begin. Thanks.

chaostheory2• 18 years ago

well there's a non-free tool assoc with it that spits it out in dif file formats (html, word, pdf, ...)

http://www.readysetpro.com/

bayareaguy• 18 years ago

I currently use Scrivener, MultiMarkdown, TexShop, MacTex and OmniGraffle if I have a diagram or two.

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html is a combination outliner/editor for OSX. Most of its features are focused on allowing you to manage a lot of different bits of a larger document. There's a full XSLT generation engine inside it so you can get it to generate just about anything you want if you're willing to roll up your sleeves a bit.

http://fletcherpenney.net/MultiMarkdown is a simple markup syntax (derived from Markdown) which Scrivener supports.

Scrivener and MultiMarkdown together generate HTML or LaTeX from the base document, so you need to use something like http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop and http://www.tug.org/mactex to get something worth printing.

kingkongrevenge• 18 years ago

POD. Learn it in 10 minutes. Generates all formats. Embeddable in code, if appropriate.

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html

binglo6• 18 years ago

Yes. Thank you. I like POD for man-page -style docs, but for longer multi-section docs I'm not sure it buys you much more than plain text (except that you can easily convert to other formats). Also, it's harder to read than plain text -- though maybe easier than docbook xml.

The POD docs I see as html are just single long html pages. I realize this is just an implementation issue though.

Ask HN: documentation format?

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