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A short-list with documentation generators in 2019

Sm0ke on June 21, 2019

Hello Coders, At some point, in order to improve our skills, we read the documentation provided by the underline technology. In this article, I a...
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Evan Oman

I am a huuge fan of AsciiDoc. The syntax is very similar to MarkDown, making the source easily readable. However it has a lot of extra features for rendering and composing source files so can be used to build all sorts of documents. You can render the same source into HTML, PDF, DocBook, and even a man-page format. Plus the tooling is available on CLI and in our Java Gradle projects using AsciiDoctorJ.

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Sm0ke

The post-processing translation to PDF, EPUB ... can be very useful.
I will add it to the list.
Also, feel free to share a documentation project, in the case is public.

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Shamil Vakhitov

AsciiDoctor is cool, here is an extended and more production ready generator on top of AsciiDoctorJ: pzdcdoc.org

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Casey Brooks

I've been building Orchid to be especially good for making a single website for both wiki-type prose documentation, and also API docs for your code. It also deploys your site automatically to Github Pages!

GitHub logo orchidhq / Orchid

Build and deploy beautiful documentation sites that grow with you

Orchid

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A beautiful and truly unique documentation engine and static site generator.

Example Orchid site

Orchid is a brand-new, general-purpose static site generator for Java and Kotlin, with a focus on extensibility and aimed at developers looking to improve their technical documentation. Orchid was born out of a desire for better-looking Javadocs and frustration with how difficult is it to manage large Jekyll sites and keep it up-to-date with your code.

Orchid supports a variety of plugins, including a wiki, static pages, blogs, and much more. It aims to have high compatibility with many of the existing static site generators, such as Jekyll, Gitbook, and Hugo, so that migration to Orchid is painless. And if you can't find a plugin to do what you need, Orchid provides an intuitive way to add your own private plugins and a rich API so you can make your site as beautiful and unique as an Orchid.

It currently supports generating docs for Java, Kotlin, Groovy, and Swift; Ruby and Javascript are on the roadmap too. A recent update also added support for automatically pulling in wiki content from Github and Gitlab Wikis.

Here's a good intro to getting started with Orchid:

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Sm0ke

looks good.

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Tomás Vírseda

Hi there!

Not sure if my application falls in this category but I have just released a project in GitHub with the same purpose: generate a website based on Asciidoctor sources.

I wrote a post here some days ago.

Thanks for the list!

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Sm0ke • Edited

Hello Tomas,
I will take a look. Thank You!

[Update] - KB4IT added to the list along with a Github *
Good luck with the project.

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Alexander Alemayhu • Edited

VuePress is really nice and give you a good look by default, IMHO a three word summary is not really fair. Since it has a lot to offer like themes, configuration and plugins. Also the PWA things are neat.

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arrlancores

Previously I choose docsify to create our dev guideline, it really easy to use and all javascript dev can use it with only need to install the package via npm.

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Sm0ke

Hello,
I've added docsify to the list. In case you have a public project somewhere built with Doscsify, please share it.

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Berislav Lopac

I particularly like mkdocs.org/

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Sm0ke

Yep, this tool does the job.