Sphinx

I have been using a tool called Sphinx to help write some documentation recently. Writing documentation is boring, time consuming and rubbish. Sphinx doesn’t magically make all those problems go away but it is a great tool none the less.

• It has a nice fluid syntax which is near to how I’d normally jot down notes in notepad.
• It’s layered so that it separates the actual documentation files from the presentation of those files.
• Presentation can be in the form of a complete HTML web site or PDF (amongst others) and this is all done automatically for you.
• It allows for theming of the HTML output so you can integrate you’re documentation directly into your web site.
• Creation of contents tables, index pages and search area is all done, no effort required.

I’ve tried writing documentation both in a word document and as a HTML web page. Both methods are a nightmare to manage with infinite page long word documents and the constant need to write all the HTML tags/links for the web page method. I just want to write the words that make my documentation and that’s what Sphinx lets me do.

Now where can I get a GUI for it?

This entry was posted on June 1, 2010 at June 1, 2010 and is filed under Productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.