rst2nitrile VS mm-docs

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

I am glad to know there are those that put so much thought into documentation. Documentations is just another service, and deserves all the same methodology: CI/CD, tests, components, reuse etc.

As far as I can see, you can get similar workflow with combination of existing tools. I created this docker image that combines them for very easy consumption and created thousands of pages of technical, functional and user documentation with it:

https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-docs