Best Documentation and Publishing Tools for developers

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,be 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.

Why would a tool like Microsoft word not help you ?

The short and simple explanation is that writing documentation most at times requires that you write code snippets to show how a project works, so Word is not the best choice.

Here we go!!! The list is long but I will talk about a selected few.

Haroopad

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 flavoured markdown as well.

Since haroopad uses basically markdown, you have the joy of syntax highlighting with your programming language of choice. Other features include;

• Ability to select your preferred theme
• Ability to embed Mathjax expressions
• And the best of all is ability to export files to html,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 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 or Amazon S3 or other services.

Even with the site being hosted locally, you have the ability to search the site.

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 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 pages can be hosted on Github pages or Amazon S3

Hugo

Hugo is a static site generator like Jekyll and Mkdocs as well and it is faster as far as the build process is concerned compared to Jekyll. Hugo is base on Go Programming language. Hugo has a set of themes you can choose from as well. Try Hugo today…

Retext

ReText is a simple editor for Markdown and reStructuredText markup languages. It is written in Python as well.
Retext requires the following to be installed
- Python 3.2 or higher
- PyQt5
- Python-markups

There are tonnes of other tools out there but these ones standout as good choices…

Good luck as you checkout these tools…