Automation & legacy techniques

Practical guides covering documentation tooling, single-source automation, structured authoringStructured authoringWriting content whose markup encodes meaning (this is a warning, this is a step) rather than just visual appearance — enabling automated processing, reuse, and consistency checks that unstructured formats can't support.View in glossary →, and multi-format publishing workflows.

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Note

These tutorials cover specialist or historical implementation techniques - Jinja, Python, sed, Sphinx/ReST, XSL-FO, and the Raspberry Pi. They are not recommended defaults for new documentation projects; for current practice, see adopt docs-as-code and choose an authoring model.

Structured authoring and single-sourcing

Techniques for filtering, profiling, and transforming source documents across multiple deliverables.

DITA XML and XSL-FO tutorialsStep-by-step tutorials for authoring in DITA XML and generating PDF output with XSL-FO style sheets.

Create different documents from the same sources via Jinja (object method)Define audience, platform, and version as Python objects, then let Jinja filter your content at build time - cleaner than string-based flags.

Create different documents from the same sources using JinjaA Python preprocessing script that uses Jinja templates to include or strip content sections before passing sources to your doc generator.

Create different documents from the same ReST sources (conditional text)Generate document variants from the same ReST sources with Sphinx conditional text.

Content automation and data integration

Techniques for querying databases and injecting dynamic product data directly into documentation at build time.

Auto-insert data into a DITA XML fileAutomate DITA XML file generation with Python: dynamically insert product data into DITA topics to industrialize technical documentation.

Automatically insert data into a reStructuredText fileTemplate a reStructuredText file so Python fills in product names and versions at build time - no manual updates per release.

Automatically insert SQL data into a reStructuredText fileQuery a product database and render the results directly into a reStructuredText file - keep docs in sync with the source of truth.

Text processing and platform tooling

Command-line text manipulation, batch refactoring, and lightweight infrastructure for documentation pipelines.

sed: modify your text without opening your filesRun targeted find-and-replace across hundreds of documentation files in one command - how sed handles batch text changes without opening a single file.

Regular expressions in PythonPython's regular expression library helps you manipulate text, especially if you're not familiar with sed or awk.

The Raspberry Pi 3 as a documentation platformWith its modest resources, a Raspberry Pi 3 is all you need to create, manage and generate documentation in PDF, HTML or EPUB format.

Managing a project from start to finishA non-profit's scattered photo archive, a zero-euro budget, and a centralized solution: one project traced from intake through delivery.