README

README (for Readme's an Extremely Accessible Documentation MakEr) is a very simple HTML documentation generator whose goal is to be as pain-free as possible to put in place, maintain and navigate.

Example of the output generated by README

The basic idea is that you can just write your own documentation as markdown files with no specific syntax on top of it. Those files can then consequently be read and updated directly in an editor with no tool-specific knowledge and also be displayed in various tools doing markdown formatting (e.g. editor plugins, GitHub's interface for source files...).

Markdown source file for the previous example

README can then produce an HTML documentation from it, keeping the same file structure, by adding a few .docConfig.json files in the directories already-exposing your documentation.

Example

If you want to see an example of the pages generated by that tool, you can look at the RxPlayer's documentation and compare it to its original markdown files.

You can also look at README's own documentation and compare it to its original markdown files.

Installation

To rely on README, you need to have Node.js and a node package manager installed (a default one, npm, will probably be automatically installed with Node.js).

The README project is published under the @canalplus/readme.doc name on npm:

npm install @canalplus/readme.doc --save-dev

Or through yarn:

yarn add @canalplus/readme.doc --dev

It is then runnable (e.g. as an npm script in your package.json or through npx) through the readme.doc name:

readme.doc --version

How to use it

See our complete documentation (which is itself generated with README :)!)

Why a new documentation generator

We're also working on the RxPlayer project, an adaptive media player library with a relatively complex and technical API. As its API is large and has many complex behaviors, we decided that having an intelligible, large and useful documentation was a central goal of this project.

Consequently, we put special care on how that documentation can be read, updated and presented. In that process we tried several other documentation generators, among them:

• docusaurus was too huge, complex, tightly-linked to other solutions like react and algolia (at least last time we checked) and it added its own syntax on top of markdown.

  We would prefer a simple tool and also be able to look to the original markdown files with no such supplementary syntax.

• docsify runs JavaScript to translate markdown on the fly. We would prefer to have the HTML files already generated and also make our documentation accessible to those who do not enable JavaScript.

We ended up finding that improving on our initially minimalist homemade documentation generator by picking some of the interesting features of other generators (documentation page list on the left, table of contents on the right, soft navigation for loading-free page switching, search feature relying on a locally-loaded index etc.) was relatively straightforward, hence README.js.

It was initially present inside the RxPlayer's repository, but we found that it made more sense to externalize that code and its dependencies through another repository once it became large enough, with the goal of letting it generate the documentation of other tools.