Helper tools for writing Documentation

Description

Tools and Plugins which will help to write documentation.

Online tools:

Offline tools:

ReText is a handy editor for .rst and .md formats. On Ubuntu and Debian-based systems all you have to do is 

apt-get install retext

Pandoc If you have existing documentation, you may want to check out pandoc , the "swiss army knife" of document conversions. For instance, it can create valid rst files from Markdown and many other formats. On Ubuntu you can install it via apt 

apt-get install pandoc

See also the online version.

Sublime Text has a number of plugins for rst highlighting and snippets, install via the Sublime package installer.

Very useful is Restructured Text Snippets, which has automated header creation, html preview and more. It even makes creating tables in ReST tolerable. Highly recommended.

The SublimeLinter framework also comes with two plugins: sublimelinter-rst will error check RST files, and write good checks your English for writing style.

When not using the Snippets, but you still want to check how the html would look, OmniMarkupPreviewer is a live previewer/exporter for markup files (markdown, rst, creole, textile...).

Emacs has a nice rst-mode. This mode comes with some Emacs distros. Try M-x rst-mode in your Emacs and enjoy syntax coloration, underlining a heading with ^C ^A

Another nice tool for Emacs is Flycheck.

Eclipse users can install ReST Editor through the Eclipse Marketplace.

Vim does syntax highlighting for RST files. There is a nice plugin called vim-markdown.

If you prefer a more advanced plugin with enhanced functionalities you could use Riv.

Restview ReStructuredText viewer A viewer for ReStructuredText documents that renders them on the fly. 

pip install restview

Language tools:

These tools can help you to check for grammatical mistakes and typos, you should always use a spell checker anyway!

LanguageTool is an Open Source proofreading software for English, French, German, Polish and more than 20 other languages. See www.languagetool.org.

After the Deadline is a language checker for the web. This handy tool is also available in your Plone sites, by the way, see the conent quality section