Features

Incremental

Hotdoc is designed as an incremental documentation system. Along with its final output, it produces a database of symbols and a dependency graph, which can be reused at the next run.

See disabling incremental build if you do not wish / need to use this feature.

Simple yet powerful syntax

Hotdoc follows the CommonMark specification and uses cmark to parse and render standalone documentation pages.

This format was chosen because it is very simple to edit, yet allows a great amount of control over the resulting layout, and the main design requirement behind the choice of the format was to lower as much as possible the barrier to contribute to documentation.

See Extensions to the CommonMark syntax for more information.

Themeability

The hotdoc html formatter supports theming. Its base output has no stylesheets or scripts applied to it whatsoever, this is handled by themes, which can additionally override the base templates. By default, hotdoc will use a theme based on bootstrap and isotope, see https://github.com/hotdoc/hotdoc_bootstrap_theme for its sources.

API

Hotdoc 1.0 will expose a (reasonably) stable API, its intended users being:

• Extension writers, which will find the task of documenting a new language much easier than writing a tool from scratch.
• Application writers, which will be able to use it for all sorts of documentation-related tasks, ranging from retrieving the raw docstring for a given symbol, to showing a live preview during editing of any documentation snippet.