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Investigation into using GitBook for documentation #615
Description
What is people's opinion about using GitBook to capture comprehensive documentation for Coin components?
Here is the link to this resource: https://www.gitbook.com/solutions/open-source.
While working on the X3D Coin implementation, I am updating the internal API documentation to reference the specification (similar to what was done for VRML code base). There will be a lot of documentation generated through this approach. But I realize that there is a lot of information that can be captured on usage and examples. So, I thought that Gitbook could be used as a "User Manual".
Coin documentation could be broken down into the following categories:
- API Documentation (generated like now, published to project web page)
- Source for docs is in code base
- Github Wiki (informal documentation for development)
- Needs to be updated
- GitBook Documentation
- Examples and Tutorial documentation
- Integrated with API documentation
- Published to project web page
- Source for documentation is in new Github repo
Activity
WizzerWorks commentedon Mar 26, 2026
If any money is generated through Sponsored tier, not sure how to manage that.
veelo commentedon Mar 26, 2026
I have spent a few minutes browsing their site, but I cannot figure out what they offer that cannot already be done with GitHub and Doxygen -- apart from being AI-powered. Do you have experience with them?
The biggest problem of Coin tutorial-wise is that the best tutorials are two books that are no longer in print ("The Inventor Mentor" and "The Inventor Toolmaker").
At my job we use Doxygen to generate a 500-page user manual in three different formats (PDF, online HTML and Qt Assistant help reader) in three different versions and four different languages, all from a single source. https://www.sarc.nl/manuals/
WizzerWorks commentedon Mar 27, 2026
I don't have any experience with GitBook. I was hoping it might help with generating example and tutorial documentation for Coin based on the API documentation or previous examples that we could feed it. Like creating a language model for Coin applications. GitBook might not be that tool.
veelo commentedon Mar 28, 2026
If it is the AI bit that you find interesting, it may be worth giving them a try. Personally I don't expect much of it, but I am certainly not the right guy to ask about the state of the art in AI ;-)