rst2nitrile VS mkdocstrings

Last week I ported my static physical book building tooling from rst-based [0] to markdown (pandoc filter) based.

I've used my rst tooling to publish many books (like Effective Pandas) and am wanting to drop rst in an effort to simplify my life. My pandoc toolchain is not in github yet, but preliminary exploration validates that I can publish my next physical book with it (with things like front matter, indices, etc).

In the process I messed around with MyST and mistletoe. I dropped MyST because it was evident I would need to mess around with Sphinx again. Been there done that. Too much abstraction.

Mistletoe would have worked too (I need to create custom fences/markup for a few features) but I wanted to see if I could do it with Pandoc.

The Pandoc distinction between Blocks and Inlines is annoying as is the requirement to handle everything at once. With Pandoc, you only get notified at the start of an element, not the end which probably complicates it a bit more than Mistletoe would have.

(I still need to port my slide generation tooling and will probably use mistletoe for that. For epub generation I think I will stick with Pandoc.)

0 - https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2nitrile

Mkdocs has the mkdocstrings plugin, offering limited automated API documentation capabilities. It is however nowhere near as capable as Sphinx' autodoc, missing granularity in its configuration, limited intersphinx-like cross-referencing support, and essential features like documentation of inherited members, or the ability to manually describe objects if needed.

mkdocstrings works well, although it is not as powerful as the API documentation in Sphinx.

Author of Materia for MkDocs here. MkDocstrings [1] implements automatic generation of reference documentation from sources. It's language-agnostic, actively maintained and currently supports Python [2] and Crystal [3]. It also integrates nicely with Material for MkDocs.

[1]: https://mkdocstrings.github.io/

Some time has passed since I first introduced mkdocstrings here on reddit. If you don't know what mkdocstrings is: it's the equivalent of the autodoc Sphinx extension, but for MkDocs, a Markdown static site generator. It works differently though, and supports multiple languages by design (not only Python). Someone actually wrote a very good handler for the Crystal language, and another user on GitHub recently expressed their interest for writing one for Go.

Write proper docstrings as you go along (every time you write a new class/method/function you can document what it’s doing as you’ll know why and what from the pattern you chose). Using a tool like mkdocstrings makes maintaining documentation for larger projects automatic.

I learned of https://github.com/pawamoy/mkdocstrings recently. Is it similar ?

A user of mkdocstrings wrote a Crystal handler for their own use-case. They asked on the Gitter channel if we could allow to load external handlers, so they don't have to fork the project and install the fork, but rather just install their lightweight package containing just the handler.