github-docs VS pandoc

In college, an English professor would ask me and other students the following question when reviewing our essays, “Where are the examples?” Developers ask the same question when reading your documentation. To write good technical writing documents, include examples that developers can see themselves implementing in their work. How can this be done? By adding examples from your product’s codebase! 🙂 Let’s look at this code snippet from my contribution to GitHub’s documentation:

Need an example? Check the GitHub docs contributing guide.

git clone https://github.com/github/docs.git 123.57s user 37.02s system 74% cpu 3:35.73 total

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/github/docs.git 3.37s user 1.83s system 35% cpu 14.521 total

Not a scientific test at all, but the second one was literally 35x faster, wall clock time.

Docs

The strange thing is that I only have this problem with github, all other websites work just fine. And even docs.github.com works fine...

99.9 at best for enterprise cloud: https://github.com/github/docs/blob/main/content/site-policy/site-policy-deprecated/github-enterprise-service-level-agreement.md

A project repository typically has a license file at the top-level indicating which license the code falls under. See here for an example license file.

My main authoring tool is then Emacs Markdown Mode (https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/). For data entry, it comes with some bells and whistles similar to org-mode, like C-c C-l for inserting links etc.

I seldom export my notes for external usage, but if it is the case, I use lowdown (https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/) which also comes with some nice output targets (among the more unusual are Groff and Terminal). Of cource pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) does a very good job here, too.

This is one of those things that the ever-amazing pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) does very well, on top of supporting virtually every other document format.

Folks feel the same way about Markdown versus LaTeX: why use something significantly more complicated where a looser, human-readable grammar works better?

For any other situations, I use https://pandoc.org/, or, generate a Word doc scriptomatically.

pandoc toolchain pour builder une version confortable/imprimable en phase de travail (ePub, pdf, docx, html)

Congrats on the launch, I guess, but there are so many free options that I can't think of a situation where paying $0.25 per document would be justified...? Just to name a few:

Back in the days, I used to use XSL-FO [0] and it was okay. It was not very precise but it rarely if ever broke, and was perfectly integrated with an XML/XSLT solution. Yeah, this was a long time ago.

Last month I used html-to-pdfmake [1] and it's also not very precise and more fragile, but very efficient and fast.

Yet another approach would be to pro grammatically generate .rtf files (for example) and use Pandoc [2] to produce PDFs (I have not tried this in production but don't see why it wouldn't work).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/html-to-pdfmake

[2] https://pandoc.org/

Others have mentioned static site generators. I like Hakyll [1] because it can tightly integrate with Pandoc [2] and allows you to develop custom solutions if your needs ever grow.

[1]: https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/

[2]: https://pandoc.org/

Have you compared it with a conversion by pandoc (https://pandoc.org/)?

I have used it to kickstart a blogging project that I wish to come back to soon. The Lua inter-op for custom readers, writers and filters is great but I wish there was more editor integration and even perhaps an official IDE/editor with built-in debugging features (probably something already do-able with Emacs but I haven't checked). The only blocker for my project is no support for "ChunkedDoc" for Lua filters [1] which forces me to write more code and a complicated Makefile.

[1]: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/9061