Helper Tools For Writing Documentation

Description

Tools and Plugins which will help to write documentation.

Online Tools

Offline Tools

ReText is an editor for .rst and .md formats. On Ubuntu and Debian-based systems all you have to do is

apt-get install retext

Pandoc If you have existing documentation, you may want to check out pandoc , the “swiss army knife” of document conversions. For instance, it can create valid rst files from Markdown and many other formats. On Ubuntu you can install it via apt

apt-get install pandoc

See also the online version.

Sublime Text has a number of plugins for rst highlighting and snippets, install via the Sublime package installer.

Restructured Text Snippets, which has automated header creation, html preview and more.

The SublimeLinter framework also comes with two plugins: sublimelinter-rst will error check RST files, and write good checks your English for writing style.

When not using the Snippets, but you still want to check how the html would look, OmniMarkupPreviewer is a live previewer/exporter for markup files (markdown, rst, creole, textile…).

Watch the video on YouTube.

Emacs has a rst-mode. This mode comes with some Emacs distros. Try M-x rst-mode in your Emacs and enjoy syntax coloration, underlining a heading with ^C ^A

Another tool for Emacs is Flycheck.

Eclipse users can install ReST Editor through the Eclipse Marketplace.

Vim does syntax highlighting for RST files. There is a plugin called vim-markdown.

If you prefer a more advanced plugin with enhanced functionalities you could use Riv.

Restview ReStructuredText viewer A viewer for ReStructuredText documents that renders them on the fly.

pip install restview

Language Tools

These tools can help you to check for grammatical mistakes and typos, you should always use a spell checker anyway!

LanguageTool is an Open Source proofreading software for English, French, German, Polish and more than 20 other languages. See www.languagetool.org.

After the Deadline is a language checker for the web. This tool is also available in your Plone sites, see the content quality section