Recommendations for writing a user guide with examples?

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Sun Dec 9 17:19:43 EST 2007


"Paddy" <paddy3118 at googlemail.com> wrote in message 
news:3aaf641b-4f83-4895-aeae-10138d4e6d19 at e67g2000hsc.googlegroups.com...
| On Dec 8, 9:22 pm, Neal Becker <ndbeck... at gmail.com> wrote:
| > I'm looking for recommendations for writing a user manual.  It will 
need
| > lots of examples of command line inputs and terminal outputs.
| >
| > I'd like to minimize the effort to integrate the terminal input/output 
into
| > my document.  I have lots of experience with latex, but I wonder if 
there
| > may be some other choices.  Maybe docutils, pydoc, something else?  The
| > code I'm documenting is written in python, if that matters.
|
| Doctest and restructuredtext.
| http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html

Doctest is definitely the way to go to test input/output examples.
It can be used with text output from any editor/word processor that 
preserves the example block.  I have used it with .txt versions of an 
OpenOffice .odt file.

The Python docs master copies are, I believe, changing from Latex to RST 
for 2.6.  So that seems like a plausible choice for someone who wants 
visible markup instead of wysiwyg.

tjr









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