Generate beautiful documentation portals in seconds from easy-to-edit markdown files. Bundle your markdown files into a Preact app easily distributable on the World Wide Web:tm:
This project is a heavy WIP and is not usable yet.
This package hasn't been published yet.
See USAGE.md for information about how to use this.
Writing documentation is already a boring process, and the documentation team may not have time to put into distributing it in an easy-to-access format.
Spoonfeed takes care of that for you or your team. Focus on writing crystal clear documentation, in an easy-to-edit format, and let Spoonfeed take care of the rest.
Originally, a few Borkenware projects used their own rice of documentation generator which was a pain since they all shared slight differences. We decided to unify all of our pieces in a unified tool that not only us can benefit from.
Spoonfeed's design has been really influenced by how Discord structured their API documentation. However, we were not super convinced by the approach they have been taking to incorporate those markdown files in their Developer Portal.
In their Developer Portal, Discord sends the raw markdown to the clients, and then their React application uses Simple Markdown and HLJS to render the portal contents. While this is easy to implement, this means the client has to download and run way more JS code than it should: according to Bundlephobia, HLJS is 93.6kB minified, and Simple Markdown 14.9kB. Plus the weight of the markdown blob.
What Spoonfeed does is it parses the markdown files at compile time, and outputs a plain Preact component. This means we no longer need libraries to parse our markdown at-runtime, reducing the load times and the processing power required (which is a valuable resource for mobile devices).
We love React at Borkenware, but it unfortunately often ends up in rather large bundles, which is not justified here since we don't use a lot of React features. So we've decided to ship Preact, to have the best of the two worlds.
We will in the future also support generating plain html files, for compatibility with GitHub pages or if you prefer it that way. They will most likely come with a reduced feature set, though.
GitHub suggested fictional-spoon when creating the repo. No it's not a joke it's actually how it got this name.