Using Gitbook for SDK Reference

Moving email between @Alain and me to discourse. This is in reference to future directions for SDK documentation


On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 7:03 AM, Alain Cormier wrote:
BTW, I had a quick look at GitBook today and it’s awesome!
Alain

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 9:59 PM, Steve Baer wrote:
Gitbook does look like a good platform to use for building our SDK reference. If you have ideas on how to set this up, I would love to see them.
-Steve

On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 7:25 AM, Alain Cormier wrote:
Hi Steve,

What’s great about GitBook is that you can have your documentation come from the same repo as the code you want to document (literate programming: code and docs as one). Your book can be versioned and always be in sync with releases, i.e., one version in sync with the MacRhino branch and another in sync with wip. The book pages can reference comments that are directly in the code or the code itself. I haven’t done any formatting but here’s a link to my experiment: https://www.gitbook.com/book/acormier/rhinopythondocs/details.

It wouldn’t be too bad to bring everything in from Robohelp. I could do things like:

Another thing worth mentioning is the the complete gitbook toolchain is available (https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook) so you can build books locally and even host them yourself instead of on gitbook.com.

What do you think?
Cheers,
Alain

I think we need to focus on finishing what is necessary to ship Mac Rhino first, which to me means completing the necessary documentation for the new atom/RhinoPython additions using our current tools.

That said, I do think that your initial experiments with gitbook look promising and show potential of being our documentation source for the future. I would like to have a single site that users could go to for C++, .NET, and python documentation (and possibly GH). What we have right now is a wiki and independent references for these different SDKs which is obviously not an optimal solution for anyone.

Please continue working on this experiment once your Mac Rhino list is cleared off.

Sounds good.