[qbasic_forever]

Some good info here: https://docusaurus.io/docs/#comparison-with-other-tools

It's the same general wheelhouse of documentation tools as mdbook, i.e. take a pile of markdown and produce high quality documentation. One of the standout features of Docusaurus is that it's based on React so it builds a SPA for your documentation (while still being good about pre-rendering, etc. for good SEO). If you load up a Docusaurus site and start clicking around to read docs it feels like a native app without clunky refreshes, etc. It's very extensible and can be turned into very custom and slick documentation portals.

It also supports MDX which is a a version of markdown that embeds React controls and allows interesting client-side interactivity in your documents. This is very handy for frontend libraries and tools which typically have a showcase or component library which you can interact directly from the docs.

[pbowyer]

It'd be great if the Docusaurus team added mdBook and Bookdown to their comparison, with an emphasis on code example execution or including code from larger programs. I find that feature of mdBook invaluable (its marker-approach makes documenting how a library works very easy, and keeps the code examples up-to-date as the library evolves) and Bookdown's include code & its output is also good.

Just a shame one package doesn't include every one of these features.

[slorber]

Do you have a link to these features? I believe we somehow support those already.

It's be complicated for us to provide a deep comparisons with every single existing doc tool. I've never used mdBook myself.

[pbowyer]

Sure. Here's mdBook's code embedding: https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/format/mdbook.html

Bookdown/rMarkdown/Knitr is best explained at https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/articles_intro.html#knitr-for-... and the user docs are at https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/r-code.html and https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/language-engines.html.

I like being able to test that the code in my documentation is valid and runs, and to show the output without having to copy and paste it.

Hope htat's useful!

When I looked at Docusaurus I had the impression it would work very well for JavaScript projects where you could runt he code in-browser, but wasn't designed to document other language code?

[slorber]

We use MDX which basically compiles markdown to React components and allows to interleave components inside md content. So you can do similar things like having one doc importing the other. Maybe not as flexible (like importing only a few lines of the other doc).

You can display real production source code in code blocks in any language without having to copy-paste and it can stay in sync.

The live playground allows you to display js code blocks and print the result in the browser. I don't see how this could work with other languages.