Some time ago, we wrote a tutorial underlining the importance of documentation for the internet. At the bottom of our post, we parted with this rallying call:

And once you make good documentation…

STANDARDIZE IT! Make default templates for the above types of documentation, and develop a checklist for your documentation, so that completing a project can be as easy as running through checkmarks on a list. Save the creativity for the parts of the project that demand it, and let your documentation help guide you through the project while taking up as little of your time as possible.

Sometimes, you have to lead by example, so we went out and did just that. We set out to develop a set of open documentation templates you could use to help document and develop your projects. They are meant to help organize the structure of your documentation (you’ll still have to supply the content, sorry). Once you configure the templates, however, you won’t have to do it again, and will be able to simply start writing documentation for your projects. You can find our latest open documentation templates in our github repository.

The open documentation templates are written in the open source typesetting language LaTeX, which provides several advantages. First, it’s open source, which we’re all about here at NBitWonder. Second, it’s cross-platform compatible, meaning the same templates should work on Mac OSX, Windows, and Linux realizations of LaTeX. Finally, extensions to LaTeX exist that can allow users to export their documentation to pdf, html, wiki, or many other formats.

All of that flexibility and power does come at the expense of user friendliness. In designing the templates, we tried to tailor them to limit the LaTeX knowledge required to write documentation to the contents of the LaTeX Wikibook. Beyond that, you need but adjust the values of some constants and change some pictures to suit your needs, so simply recompile until LaTeX provides the documentation format you desire.

Examples of the documentation templates can be seen in the pictures at the top of this post. For some more examples, you can check out our flickr page, as well as our projects on github, where the templates are being used to document our projects.

We hope the templates provide you with a useful starting point for better documenting your future projects. If you feel we’re missing something, or that the templates could be improved in some way, please feel free to join the discussion in our forums.