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Dimer
p/dimer
Simplest way to write and publish beautiful docs
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Jamie Edwards
Dimer Beta — Simplest way to write and publish beautiful docs
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Dimer makes it easy to publish documentation from simple extended Markdown, with a distraction-free writing experience, live preview and handcrafted themes for a beautiful docs experience.

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Dane Lyons
Looks like a simpler solution that a lot of other roll-your-own solutions. What is the workflow like for maintaining docs? I find that to be one of the major pain points in writing documentation and if the process isn't great, docs get stale fast.
Harminder Virk
Maker
@duilen Hello Dane! I completely agree with you, and that's why we want to keep everything simple without introducing new concepts. Let's start from what we have right now. Since the docs are published from a CLI, you keep all of your docs in a folder and it can be nested folders too. The order of topics in the sidebar is decided from the order of files in your folder. This approach gives you a visual clarity of the tree and to maintain the order easily, we recommend prefixing the file names with numbers. Our docs are open source, so you can just take a look at them https://github.com/dimerapp/docs... too. Going forward, with our cloud editor, we will follow the same approach and show you the docs as a list of files in a folder. Reference screenshot If you have any other questions or suggestion, please feel free to share them. We are starting out and always happy to discover different workflows other people have in place.
Dragos Ivanov
I wanted to try it out, but right after I clicked on start, I was asked to login so I'm not gonna do it. Why not a simple test window where you can write? Just a suggestion.
Jamie Edwards
Hunter

Dimer is everything you'd expect when a developer and a designer join forces to built a docs generator. It is easy to use, simple to maintain and the output is beautiful. Couldn't recommend highly enough!

Pros:

Design and readability focused, super simple to maintain

Cons:

None

Jamie Edwards
Hunter
It is great to see your awesome side-project graduate, Harminder and Abhi! I can't wait to see what's next.
Mattijs Bliek
Looks really interesting! For me this would be most used to host code documentation such as API references etc. I couldn’t find any info in your docs related to code specific docs, like syntax highlighting, displaying endpoint urls, and formatting endpoint parameters. Is this something you support at the moment? Or maybe it’s on the roadmap? Anyway, I think you’re off to a great start. All the best :)
Harminder Virk
Maker
@mattijsbliek Hello Mattijs! Currently, we are focusing to support hand written markdown documentation only. Which does covers formatted codeblocks and infact embeding code playgrounds like Codepen and Repl.it. In short term there are no plans to add support for REST API documentation and there is a reason for that. The API documentation must always stay in sync with your actual API server, otherwise it doesn't serves it's purpose. And the best to way keep it in sync is to use tools like https://swagger.io. They have fantasitic support for auto-generating API reference guides https://swagger.io/swagger-codegen. To give you more idea, Dimer is focused to build documentation similar to React, Ember or https://stripe.com/docs
Mattijs Bliek
@amanvirk1 Thanks for clarifying! My initial thought was to run 'dimer publish' as part of the deployment step, so docs are always to date. But I can definitely see why API references is not the thing you‘re focussing on now.
Harminder Virk
Maker
@mattijsbliek Sure! Also `dimer publish` will work great if it's still about publishing markdown. Here's how the flow will look like. 1. You have bunch of hand written markdown living on Github 2. Someone commits to a branch. 3. Your CI (travis, circleCI) build kicks on. 4. As part of the build process, you download the Dimer CLI and run `dimer publish`, which will update the website. Thanks!
Abhimanyu Rana
Maker
Dimer designer here. About 2 months ago, @amanvirk1 & I decided to build Dimer as a side project, with the goal of building a simplest way to publish documentation website from Markdown. Dimer helps you in publishing your documentation online by offering distraction-free writing experience, extended markdown and beautiful, handcrafted themes. Today, we are launching our first public beta which includes the following: — Access to the Dimer CLIs — Handcrafted default theme — Brand new website — New releases every 2 weeks — Community support Next up: — Landing pages — Multilingual support — Cloud editor — Documentation search — Workflow pipelines Would love to hear your thoughts! Best, Abhi
JDP
Congrats Abhi and Harminder! Self-service and developer documentation is so important for startups/API teams to get right - Dimer helps. It's simple, beautiful, and effortless: everything you need to produce supremely helpful documentation.
Alicia Carney
Loving this! Simple, beautiful, and accessible documentation is so important beyond the scope of a developer's role. The number of times I've received real customer comments on the clarity (or lack there of) on our API docs astounds me as a product marketer. This is a critical piece to any viable, competitive SaaS business and I'm so pleased to see a solution like Dimer that solves real customer problems coming onto the playing field.
Pedro J. Martínez
Really simple and straightforward product. Love it.
Steve Ebenezer Paul
It's simple and beautiful. Makes you see more, by seeing less.