As a developer, one of the biggest tasks is documentation not even the code you write. You might have an open source project that you will want others to contribute to but they can only contribute most at times if there is a documentation,being it PDF format or web format. Another worry can be writing a book but you do not know which tool to use. Well , that is what this article addresses; showing you tools you can use for documenting or publishing. So let’s talk about documentation and publishing tools for developers.
Why would a tool like Microsoft word not help you as a documentation and publishing tool ?
The short and simple explanation is that writing documentation most at times requires that you write code snippets to show how a project works, especially when it comes to syntax highlighting. So Word is not the best choice for you.
Here we go!!! The list is long but I will talk about a selected few…
Haroopad
haroopad documentation tool
As described on their website, haroopad is a markdown enabled document processor for creating web-friendly documents.
You can write documents of various types ranging from blog posts, slides, presentations, reports, email and more. Most of my articles are usually done with Haroopad offline before I take them online. The requirement for Haroopad is a knowledge of Markdown and it supports Github flavored markdown as well.
Since haroopad uses basically markdown, you have the joy of synta highlighting wth your programming language of choice. Other features include;
- Ability to select your preferred theme
- Ability to embed Mathjax
- And the best of all is ability to export files to html and pdf
Why not download Haroopad today and have a try as it runs on the three major operating systems Windows,MacOS X and Linux…
MkDocs
MkDocs documentation tool
MkDocs is a static site generator geared towards building project documentation. This is one of the great tools I have had the chance to use as well.
With Mkdocs, you write your documentation with markdown as well and you can publish it with just a few commands to Github Pages and Amazon S3 or other services.
Mkdocs requires Python to be installed as well as pip. Check installation guide on their website.
Mkdocs as well has different themes that you can choose from to customise the look of your site.
Jekyll
Jekyll documentation and publishing tool
Jekyll like Mkdocs, is a static site generator but this one is based on Ruby. It is built by the co-founder of Github so you can only imagine how cool that is.Jekyll like Mkdocs can be hosted on Github Pages and Amazon S3 as well. So, you can dive into this documentation tool and get the most out of it.
Hugo
Hugo documentation and publishing tool
Hugo is a static site generator like Jekyll and Mkdocs. But well, and it is faster as far as the build process is concerned compared to Jekyll. This tool is based on Go language. It has a set of themes you can choose from as well. Try Hugo today it is a great documentation tool…
Retext
ReText is a simple editor for Markdown and reStructuredText markup languages. It is written in Python as well.Retext requires the following packages to be installed on your system;
There are tonnes of other tools out there but these ones standout as good choices… Good luck as you checkout these documentation and publishing tools…
Do you want to get into Kotlin as an alternative to java ? check this post.Check this post about building Multilingual Cross-platform applications with Xamarin.Forms Here.
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