Huw Davies
<[email protected]> writes:

> I’m in the process of building a number of somewhat more complex Linux
> (Centos) SAN based environments. I need to document the storage layout
> (from the physical disk layout right through to the filesystems in
> their various volume groups) and hoped someone had a pointer to a tool
> that could produce nice, preferably HTML, documentation automatically.
>
> I have in the passed used a tool on AIX that did almost what I needed
> but adopting it for Centos would be very challenging (especially as it
> was written in Perl and I’m more of a Python guy).

Who is the target audience of this documentation?
e.g. end users, managers or devs?

What is the nature of the documentation?
e.g. is it a user manual, API documentation, FR, technical design,...?

These questions inform what tool you use.

For non-dev/non-API docs, I have best results using reStructured Text --
it has a more rigorous and complete feature set than markdown, and it
has an explicit IR (so multiple output formats are natural).

For more formal deliverables I render it using python-sphinx, which
extends rst (backwards-incompatibly) with some tech writing features --
the main one I use being the "toctree" directive.  I prefer to build the
PDF's via sphinx's default latex theme, though rst2pdf can rend directly
(thus fewer dependencies).

rst support in non-Python languages is usually aggravatingly
feature-incomplete, e.g. (as at last time I checked) gitit (Haskell)
doesn't support obvious things like definition lists, let alone Emacs'
M-x table-insert compatible tables with row and column spans.

If I need math or bib, I use LaTeX.


For diagrams, I wish I still had access to OmniGraffle[0];
I tend vacillate between graphviz, inkscape, dia, pic and ascii art,
depending on my mood and the kind of diagram I want.

[0] non-free, OS X only.

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