Introducing REV23 Docs

We’re happy to announce the launch of REV23 Docs! We’ve been hard at work upgrading our user documentation to a new system and are launching it (in preview form) to replace the REV23 Desktop User Guide.

Found at https://docs.rev23.com, these new docs are being completely rewritten and restructured to make things easier to locate, search and read, as a well as publish and collaborate.

Our user guide has never been great. Writing technical documentation is hard. Frankly, I don’t like doing it, and it showed. The commercial tool we used for authoring our user guide always rubbed me the wrong way, and as a result, I didn’t like using it. It used a single file and proprietary format, so collaboration was impossible, which I also disliked. Finally, any time I wanted to upload a new topic or make slight changes, it was a twenty-minute process each time. However, there weren’t many other choices for writing docs as complex as REV23 Desktop requires, so we were kind of stuck it with.

Earlier this year, I started migrating our docs to Markdown files. Markdown, at its most basic is text-to-HTML conversion language that you can compose in Notepad if you choose. It’s easy to learn and widely supported. In fact, I compose the REV23 blog in Markdown.

Additionally, our docs are being made open source and hosted on GitHub. What this means is we’re releasing the “source code” to our docs publicly. The result is anyone can contribute to them, fork them (for your own version if you want to include specific information to your studio for your users), and report issues or send feedback. While I don’t anticipate many of you writing docs for us, the option is there.

• Visit the REV23 Desktop Docs
• Visit the REV23 Docs GitHub repository.

We’re still working to update topics as fast as we can, and some sections are still empty (most sections were empty in the old user guide). Some sections were pulled right from the old user guide and reformatted to markdown and left alone for now. But with this new system, adding a new topic or making a change takes a few seconds to upload and publish vs the previous twenty-minutes. Overall, we polished this to a point where it was able to supersede our existing user guide even though it’s not “done.” Though these docs will never really be done.
The Quick Start guide has been slightly upgraded to flow a little better and simplify things even more for new REV23 users and new hires to your studio.

Check out the new docs and let us know what you think!