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Ask HN: What are you using for public documentation these days?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you using for public documentation these days?

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Update to a more recent version, they re-worked the nav to be one menu on mobile.

That was a very low-hanging fruit. Could fix and deploy it in a few minutes. There are few other improvements too related to navigation in the latest Docusaurus. Deployed here: https://docs.tooljet.com

Much better, thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What are you using for public documentation these days?

#82
post #30

We (Handsontable) now use VuePress[1] for our docs[2] and we are very happy with it. The best feature for us is the ease of customization. Our challenge right now with the docs is to get a fantastic code snippet runner there. But that's beyond the scope of your regular documentation management tool, I suppose. VuePress will make it easy for us to integrate our solution. [1] https://vuepress.vuejs.org/ [2] https://han…

I can vouch for VuePress as well. It's fairly straightforward to set up, and extremely easy to deploy. I've used it to not only write the docs for my 6502 assembler, MOS[1], but I took advantage of the fact that VuePress could generate a very simple front page as well.

[1] https://mos.datatra.sh

Re: Ask HN: What are you using for public documentation these days?

#83

We are using Docusaurus ( https://docusaurus.io/ ). - it is easy to configure/customise - looks really great out of the box - solid documentation - fast In our case, we just had to change the colors and font. Here is our Docusaurus code if that's helpful: https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/tree/develop/docs and here is the live documentation: https://docs.tooljet.com/

We also use Docusaurus. It has good defaults. If you are familiar with react, mdx (markdown + jsx) allows you to easily create and embed interactive react components.

It's technically still in beta with frequent updates, and the occasional breaking change.

For our site (https://deephaven.io/core/docs/), what I liked was the ease of adding your own plugins. We made a plugin that extracts all our code examples, and automatically tests them against new versions to notify us if any examples break or become stale.

Re: Ask HN: What are you using for public documentation these days?

#84
We use Vuepress for Typesense’s docs: https://typesense.org/docs/

I like the fact you can plug any vue components into the markdown. Haven’t started using that feature extensively yet, but the fact that it’s available is reassuring that I can customize things well if needed.

Re: Ask HN: What are you using for public documentation these days?

#85
post #4

Basic markdown and Sphinx to build into HTML, publishing via github pages. It's an open source project so putting the docs alongside the code just makes sense. Although Sphinx isn't great for my money, it gets the job done.

I have grown to absolutely love Sphinx. The plugins are wonderful, including Sphinx gallery, jupyter integration, and Sphinx-needs for requirements management.

I think it grows on you. There's a way to work with it and if you settle on that, it makes it easier than fighting against the prevailing tide. I find I spend a lot of time looking up opaque build errors but that is partly because the contributing authors aren't all that familiar with it, so their markdown is less than 'pure'

Re: Ask HN: What are you using for public documentation these days?

#86
post #51

If you're looking for a SaaS solution, I can really recommend Archbee[0]. We've moved to it from ReadMe[1] recently, due to constraints in ReadMe's product and the challenges scaling it commercially in our model. [0]: https://www.archbee.io/ [1]: https://readme.com/

What ReadMe constraints did you run into? I don't work for them, I'm just a technical writer who has to use it from time to time and wants to be aware of footguns.

Re: Ask HN: What are you using for public documentation these days?

#87

Background: I've been a technical writer for 9 years. 6 at Google, 3 as the only writer at an IoT startup. I helped Corrily with their docs [1] in August. They were interested in ReadMe.io. I wasn't keen on it because I had worked with Retool on their docs (hosted in ReadMe) a few years back and had found ReadMe lacking. But I was pleasantly surprised by how much it has progressed since then! If you're looking for a…

I did some freelance technical writing a while back and the customer was using readme.io. It has its quirks but at the end of the day I ended up really liking it and will likely use it again for such projects.

Re: Ask HN: What are you using for public documentation these days?

#88

TL;DR: Favorite stack is Notion -> notion-markdown-cms -> VuePress -> netlify So I've gone through a bit of journey doing docs for a product company. I feel that for a product company it's really important to own your documentation and the publishing workflow as it's a key part of your product. GitBooks was my first stab. I liked git and markdown, however I disliked all the places where "proprietary" formatting/featu…

Thanks for the context. Which docs system one chooses is really dependent on that person's specific goals / product so it's helpful to see your detailed thinking here.

Re: Ask HN: What are you using for public documentation these days?

#90

I like Hugo. You can chose any of the existing themes or create your own. For deployment, I wrote a simple Go server that checks a (public) GitHub repo for changes every 15 minutes and pulls + regenerates the content if necessary. You can find it here: https://docs.pirsch.io

I like Hugo as well, I'm using https://getdoks.org/
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