A Technical Documentation Template
A starting point to create documents using your company's styling and configuration. Use it to write single documents or extend it to create a powerful documentation management system.
At a previous company, I developed a template to build documents and manage them at an organizational scale. For this, I extended the open-source Sphinx documentation generator as a one-click Cookiecutter template.
Overall, it aims to help companies:
- Define a standard tooling and authoring stack
- Ensure AI readiness and scalability
- Establish content governance and quality models
- Maximize automation
- Build a launchpad for good documentation culture
More technically, I went with this Python-driven reStructuredText text documentation generator mostly because we needed:
- Easy integration into a DMS for approval and lifecycle management
- A math equation function
- Both complex tables and CSV table functions
- A PDF and HTML output
- Git version control for a strong audit trail
- Python extensibility to manage custom data inputs
- Scalability through one-click dynamic template document creation
- Easy integration into CI/CD testing and publishing pipelines
- Content reuse and variant management for multiple clients
- Easy translation management
The template
Access the template below via GitLab. See source Sphinx documentation for more information on amending the template style.
egamidocs/technical-documentation-template
Example
Quick-start
If you have existing knowledge of Git and Python. Otherwise, see the template's README for a step-by-step guide.
pip install cruft
cruft create git@gitlab.com:egamidocs/technical-documentation-template.git