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Pointers to useful, well-written, and otherwise beautiful documentation.

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Beautiful Docs

I love documentation. If you work with/are writing code intended for usage and consumption by more than one person, you should love it, too. Documentation and other resources will make or break the success of your project. And the more open and collaborative you want development to be, the more crucial docs become.

With that in mind, here's a list of docs and other developer resources that myself and others find particularly useful, well-written, and otherwise "beautiful." May they serve to inspire you when writing and designing yours. Thanks to various contributors, we now also have sections dedicated to Writing about Documentation and Tools for Generating Docs.

This should be updated fairly regularly. As usual, pull requests are encouraged.

  • If you're contributing a link, be sure to include a few words on why you're adding it and some sort of self-attribution so that people can know from whom it came.
  • All docs are listed in the order they were added. Keep this order when submitting your PR.

Mark

And Now For The Docs

Writing about Docs

Generating Docs

  • docco - Pretty docs from source code comments with ports for many languages. (contributed by @kylewest)
  • Sphinx - Comprehensive documentation tool using restructuredText with beautiful HTML and PDF output. (contributed by @nikhilcutshort)
  • MkDocs - Documentation with Markdown, written in Python. (contributed by ericbn)
  • Read the Docs - Hosted docs using Sphinx or MkDocs, supports translations and finding docs for specific software versions. Used by the Django Docs. (contributed by Stephen Paulger)
  • ApiGen - Creates clean API documentation from PHP source code (contributed by bryceadams)
  • docgenerator - Organize your documentation in Markdown files. (contributed by Florian Margaine)
  • dexy - Extensible documentation/report generator supporting multiple programming languages and several input and output formats. (contributed by troytop)
  • Slate - Static API documentation creation tool from the team at Tripit.
  • MireDot - REST API documentation generator for Java. Plugs into your build process and generates a searchable html page. (contributed by bertvh)
  • codo - CoffeeScript API documentation generator, similar to YARD. (contributed by Logan Koester)
  • Flatdoc - Create well designed open source documentation from Github repository README files or simple Markdown files. (contributed by @moore)
  • GitBook - Utility for generating documentation, books and exercises using GitHub/Git and Markdown. (contributed by Samy Pessé)
  • Daux - A documentation generator that uses a simple folder structure and Markdown files to create custom documentation on the fly. It helps you create great looking documentation in a developer friendly way. (contributed by veshinak)
  • comment.js - Simple API documentation generator. (contributed by @dciccale)
  • phpDocumentor - phpDocumentor enables you to generate documentation from your PHP source code. (contributed by shivamdixit)
  • Hologram - Hologram is a Ruby gem that parses comments in your CSS and helps you turn them into a beautiful style guide. (contributed by @jchild3rs)
  • Middleman - Static site generator using all the shortcuts and tools in modern web development. (contributed by Sota Yamashtia)
  • documentation.js - Generates documentation from JavaScript source code. (contributed by tmcw)
  • SassDoc - A Sass documentation generator that utilizes inline comments to make pretty and powerful docs. (contributed by Hugo Giraudel)
  • Pickles - Pickles is an open source living documentation generator that works on feature files written in the Gherkin language.
  • ApiDoc RESTful web API Documentation Generator that creates documentation from API descriptions in your source code. (contributed by Trenton Broughton)
  • Documentation theme for Jekyll - Documentation theme built on Jekyll. Includes detailed notes on how to tackle nearly every technical documentation scenario, from single sourcing to conditional filtering, PDF output, relative links, and more.
  • JSDoc - Generate JavaScript API documentation directly from source code comments. Also useful as a style guide for JS commenting, in general. Google uses a version of JSDoc tags for its Closure compiler.
  • Asciidoctor - Asciidoctor is a fast text processor and publishing toolchain for converting AsciiDoc content to HTML5, DocBook 5 (or 4.5) and other formats. (contributed by ThomasG77)
  • Bookdown - A open-source (GPL-3) R package to facilitate writing books and long-form articles/reports with R Markdown. Support for languages other than R, including C/C++, Python, and SQL, etc. (contributed by ThomasG77)
  • Pandoc If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Can generate documentation from most common markup languages. (contributed by ThomasG77)
  • LaTeX LaTeX is a typesetting system that has been around for almost 40 years and still very popular mostly in academia settings. Its strongest strength is in its capacity and flexibility in creating beautiful mathematical formulas. (contributed by Tao Li)
  • gd2md-html - gd2md-html is a free Google Docs add-on that converts a formatted Google Doc to a simple, readable Markdown or HTML text file. gd2md-html lets you use Google Docs' editing, formatting, and collaboration tools before you publish to a Markdown or HTML platform. (contributed by Ed Bacher)
  • Documize - One place to author, approve, publish documentation (contributed by HarveyKandola)
  • ESDoc - Documentation generator for JavaScript. Similar to JSDoc, but provides more useful features and stylish look and feel. (contributed by @bandantonio)
  • Doxygen - Doxygen is the de facto standard tool for generating documentation from almost all popular programming languages. (contributed by @nocomplexity)
  • Ignite - Markdown documentation tool built around react components as first class plugins. Docs generateed using bulma. (contributed by hipstersmoothie)
  • Docusaurus - A project by Facebook for building, deploying, and maintaining open source project websites easily. Docusaurus currently provides support to help your website use translations, search, and versioning, along with some other special documentation markdown features. (contributed by akhildaphara)
  • Scramble - Scramble generates API documentation for Laravel project. Without requiring you to manually write PHPDoc annotations. (contributed by danie1net0)
  • VuePress - Vue-powered static site generator, simplicity first and performant. (contributed by matheusfelipeog)
  • VitePress - VitePress is a Static Site Generator designed for building fast, simple, powerful and content-centric websites. (contributed by matheusfelipeog)
  • Mintlify - Hosted docs using Markdown and MDX (contributed by arnehuang)