Posted by LordOfBikes on Oct 20, 2018; 4:44am
URL: https://forum.librecad.org/User-Documentation-tp5716553p5716556.html

Many thanks Gary for drum up business

I've been recently informed about this blog post:
https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/
Very interesting reading about 4 basic types of documentation, maybe this helps us too.
Maybe nothing new, for the advanced documentation writer, but surely valuable for less documentation-prone developer

My vision for a navigable, searchable documentation is https://readthedocs.io/
They provide free hosting for open source projects, are well connected with github, our source code provider and support different offline output formats.
Beside the online version we can automatically create PDF or eBook for example. And all of this for different versions!

They use a documentation generator, called Sphinx, which uses an advanced markup language.
The markup language is one of the issues I see, it is more complex than the wiki syntax and may scare potential writers.
Also the documentation source will be kept on github, as this will provide versioning and auto build capabilities.

Possibly we can steer a middle course. Writers can still use the wiki to write individual sections if they don't want to battle with Sphinx or github.
Then advanced members can port the wiki articles to the Sphinx source.
But this will need some guidance I think, to avoid waste of efforts and smooth syncing.

I recommend to create a new wiki section to collect the ideas for structure and types of documentation.
I can link this wiki section in the sub forum head line for easy locating.

Armin