FAQ

What is the purpose of this tool?

To enable collaborative editing of documentation and the ability to publish that documentation as well as linking it to revision control system branches (like in git)

Why use Google at all. Why not use markdown and GitHub?

No collaboration in real-time. Also, markdown requires skill when managing screenshots and diagrams that are not easily accomplished in markdown.

Why not just use Google Docs?

Would love it if it were possible, but drive does not offer the ability to publish pages cleanly. The URLs are not SEO friendly. Would love it if there was a driveId map where every document could be given a friendly name (aka its title on the drive). Then (like Wikipedia has disambiguation pages), a reader could be redirected to the proper content. Google doesn’t, so this project is an attempt to fill that gap.

Also, Google does not have a good blame system for contributions to a document. Hopefully this is fixed someday but in the meantime, GitHub on markdown can help fill the void.

Why markdown?

All ears for a different preferred format. It’s easy to read when editing directly and when doing a diff for changes is clean

What about mismatches in Docs vs Markdown

There are features of Google Docs that are not going to be supported. Like coloring text, page breaks, headers, comments, etc. These features are not core to our goals for clean WYSIYYM.

Keeping a WYSIWYM style ensures a good mobile experience to view and edit.

Why not make a website front end to a Google shared drive?

Our goals are to be able to take versions of the content and commit them along with a version of the code at a point in time. By just making a website, it would allow for real-time viewing of the content but no way to go to a specific version of the documentation at a given time.

A website front end is a goal for real-time testing of the viewing experience, but initially, we want to make markdown that can be committed.