devportal VS Asciidoctor

Hello folks, I am running a tech writing team (along with product management). I am not expert in documentation platforms. Today we have a challenging custom-built documentation platform based on Sphinx and a bunch of cobbled together technologies aiven/devportal: Resources for users of the projects on the Aiven platform (github.com) . Our documentation is in .rst markup language due to the Python focus.

Humble brag that the last one in the list (Aiven 🦀) won 2022 DevPortal Awards in the category Best DevPortal Beyond REST Platforms. If I added a list of great docs websites but didn't include the OG, it would be a crime. Check out one of THE BEST documentation out there - Stripe Docs, built using Markdoc.

You can find a list of Aiven's cloud providers on [Developer.aiven.io], which is also the portal where we host the developer documentation. To quickly retrieve a list of currently-available cloud providers, my colleague Lorna Mitchell wrote a Python script that pulls our cloud listing from the Aiven API and generates documentation, which is really cool!

You have also AsciiDoctor ( https://asciidoctor.org/ ) which is alive and well. I am using it for technical CS documentation internally, but only for single page documents. I did not try to deploy their whole multi-document setup called Antora ( https://antora.org/ ).

AsciiDoc File support. ( #1876, #808, #2022)

If Maths is important to you, take a look at Asciidoc - https://asciidoctor.org/

I use Asciidoctor, highlightjs, a custom highlight.js language definition and that bash script:

AsciiDoc is so close to being good. It slam dunks Markdown, but they just have a few nagging issues that they refuse to fix, for 9 years now:

https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/issues/1087

Asciidoctor is a Ruby-based text processor for parsing AsciiDoc into a document model and converting it to HTML5, PDF, EPUB3, and other formats. Built-in converters for HTML5, DocBook5, and man pages are available in Asciidoctor. Asciidoctor has an out-of-the-box default stylesheet and built-in integrations for MathJax (display beautiful math in your browser), highlight.js, Rouge, and Pygments (syntax highlighting), as well as Font Awesome (for icons). Although Asciidoctor is written in Ruby, that does not mean you need to know Ruby to use it. Asciidoctor can be executed on a JVM using AsciidoctorJ or in any JavaScript environment (including the browser) using Asciidoctor.js. You can choose any one of three Asciidoctor processors (Ruby, JavaScript, Java/JVM) and get the same experience. You can also use the Asciidoctor Maven Plugin to convert your Asciidoc documentation using Asciidoctor from an Apache Maven build.

asciidoctor for writing

If you're looking at AsciiDoc, you'll want to look at Asciidoctor: https://asciidoctor.org/

The third system that I found was AsciiDoc, which started as a Python project, abandoned for a while and eventually resurrected by Dan Allen with Asciidoctor. AsciiDoc has a lot of features and I consider it superior to Markdown, but Asciidoctor is a Ruby program, and this made it difficult for me to use it. In addition, the standard output of Asciidoctor is a nice single HTML page but again customising it is a pain. I eventually created the site of the book using it, but adding my Google Analytics code and a sitemap.xml to the HTML wasn't trivial, not to mention customising the look of elements such as admonitions.