JetBrains previewing Writerside, an authoring and publishing tool that helps developers and writers produce technical documentation.
Introduced in an early access status on October 16, Writerside allows developers and writers to collaborate on product documentation, API references, developer guides, tutorials, and how-tos. An AI-based spellchecker and grammar correction tool supports more than 25 languages including English, German, Spanish, and Chinese.
Other features of Writerside include:
- A built-in Git UI.
- Live preview, with documents appearing exactly as readers will see them, without waiting for a build.
- Support for Markdown, XML, or the combined use of both. Developers can inject semantic attributes or semantic elements to enrich Markdown, and Markdown elements can be converted to XML.
- Ready-to-use designs, with customization options that include choosing dark or light mode, contrast, soft or vivid skins, and defining accent color to fit a brand. Authors can focus on content without designing layout and dealing with CSS.
- Automatic testing is done for broken links, missing resources, incorrect attribute values, and non-unique IDs. Code highlighting and validation are featured, with built-in inspections.
- A single source of truth for a project is maintained for content reuse.
Developers can sign up for the early access program at jetbrains.com. JetBrains said it was using Writerside internally to write documentation for products ranging from the IntelliJ Platform SDK to the Kotlin programming language.