mdBook VS Outline

I'm responsible for a number of Java products. I try to provide high-quality Javadoc for all public library interfaces, library user's guides where appropriate, and development guides for applications. The latter two take the form of MDBook documents (https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/), with the document source living in the GitHub repo so that it's tied to the particular software release in a natural way.

My org has used mdBook: https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/ (That link is itself a rendered mdBook, so that'll give you an idea of the feature set.)

(While it's definitely a Rust "thing", if you just have a set of .md files, all you need is a "SUMMARY.md" (which contains the ToC) and a small config file; i.e., you don't have to have any Rust code to use it, and it works fine without. We document a large, mostly non-Rust codebase with it.)

If you want the lowest friction, open source, easily extensible Markdown to Web, Kindle, PDF, etc. tool, highly recommend mdBook: https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook it’s written in Rust, but you don’t have to know any Rust to use it. And then wing is all CSS; for which there are many good (free) themes.

Interesting enough there seems to be an open PR for that: https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook/pull/1918

Outline is another open-source tool I’ve been using lately for note-taking and knowledgebase purposes. Previously, my app of choice for this was Bear.app. It worked out well for markdown notes, but I needed something more like a wiki to organize content. I discovered Outline in late 2022 and found it to be a snappy experience and just what I needed: nestable collections, markdown, and a decent search experience. Outline delivers that and more. It also offers real-time collaborative editing like Google Docs and public shares for either a single page or for all nested pages of a share.

Just be careful that while it is self-hostable and the source is available, it is not open source [1,2]. If this is something important for your consideration before using it.

[1] https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/main/LICENSE

[2] https://fossa.com/blog/business-source-license-requirements-...

Try outline or trillium

Outline is a simple, fast and sweet Wiki software, I recommend, this is an open source projet, the community is reactive and even the SaaS platform pricing is really honest !

Have a look at https://www.getoutline.com/

I'm really impressed by the product. Seems to be a good Confluence alternative.

- Outline