Introduction to ACF-Docu

This manual is in production, more content to come

ACF-Docu is a document administration and site creator for technical documentation.

For technical documentation, it is best to have lightweight documents with not too many formatting options. The formatting should be done with CSS styles, rather than doing formatting in each document. This ensures consistent formatting across all manual pages in all the documents.

ACF-Docu uses MarkDown formatted documents that exactly fit this purpose. The writer uses simple formatting codes in a clear text document. It has codes for Bold text, underlining, and paragraph styles, in addition to table setup, images, and links.

Each section in the manual, being a manual page is stored on individual text documents. They are added to the ACF-Docu application and categorized for the manual parts.

ACF docu then produces HTML documents, copies images into the images folder, and then pulls apart the HTML file, creating a new page with a heading, top navigation, and left navigation. The left navigation has a menu/submenu structure for navigation between the sections in the manual.

With a button click you can create all the manual pages so that all the navigations are updated in all documents. You can also create a single HTML file with all the sections in it and a Table of Contents part first.

Since those are only HTML files, the site can be in a folder for distribution, or it can be uploaded to a website. There is no server-side technology involved, so the site becomes blistering fast.

See the chapter about the Document structure, a short intro to MarkDown format in the What is Markdown chapter Look also at the Video for instructions.

The Main Window

Here is the main window used to administer the documents. The big area with the document is not an editor, just a view to recognize the document.

On the left side, you have your document list for your book, and on the right side, you have some buttons. "Open Document" opens the document in an external editor of your choice.