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Show HN: documentation generator based on markdown files in node.js

beautifuldocs.com

26 pointsemixam12 comments

DocumentUp creator here.

Cool project. Why can't we both collaborate on the same project instead and make it awesome? You seem to also be using CoffeeScript, eco, express and marked.

I have a few ideas about "Documentation as a Service", unfortunately I don't have enough time to devote to this project so it's kind of stagnating right now. Would appreciate your help.

So what made you create that?

I made it because I like to write nice documentation for my projects but I was tired of docbook. I love markdown too :)

I thought of making a github webhook to automatically generate gh-pages using it but moved on another project in the meantime.

I like your idea of documentation as a service and I think you have something great with DocumentUp. We can definitively see if we can do something together. I'm deep in another project for the next two weeks (at least) but we can chat on gtalk (maxime.bouroumeau@gmail.com - I'm in GMT+1) if you want, to see what we could do in the future.

Cool.

Looks very similar idea to http://documentup.com/, which in turn is similar to http://readthedocs.org

Seems more complete and visually engaging than the others to me. Very well done. Although a hosted version like documentup could be really great too for open source projects

Yeah I thought the same thing only DocumentUp has a better design/concept.

This is a nice concept. If you are looking for a full-featured Markdown documentation product, I just released an app called GuideKit (https://guidekit.com). It's free for open source users. We track document versions with Git, offer a Markdown editor with live previewing, and every site has question & answer forums built-in.

GuideKit seems really nice. Nice UI. However, one of the reason behind beautiful docs is to keep the documentation as files. That way, everything is in git and readable from the shell/github too.

If you add an "import/sync with github" option, this would be really great.

Funny you mentioned importing from GitHub - that feature is mostly complete and should be launching sometime this week or next. I understand where you are coming from about keeping everything in files, I think that is perfect for technical users.

I masked some of those details in GuideKit to hopefully attract both technical and non-technical users (like support teams that don't know how to use git). But, I plan to offer pull/push capability in the future so you can edit your GuideKit docs locally with a text editor and push them back up.

Anyhow, nice job with beautifuldocs. I applaud any tools that help/encourage developers to write nice docs!

If you just want to preview your Github Markdown files (e.g. your README.md) locally before committing them into Github, check out my Node.js-based Github Flavored Markdown Server: https://github.com/ypocat/gfms (it uses Github's CSS and properly parses the "```" code sections).

It would be interesting to do WYSIWYG editing of the Markdown docs here with https://github.com/bergie/createMarkdown

If by 'here' you mean HN comments and text bodies, I'd support that 100%. While many would go over-board, I think that the communication quota would increase given better looking communication.

Nope, meant the documentation tool this thread is about :-) Though agreed that more comprehensive formatting might not hurt HN either

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