Simplify Your Technical Documentation Workflow with Petal

It is often said that anyone can contribute to an Open Source project. One way for users (who may not be software developers) to get started is to help improve the project’s documentation. However, due to its very nature, technical documentation is often marked up in complex syntax and may require special tools to update it. This makes it difficult or prohibitive for new users to contribute. Petal is a browser-based WYSIWYG editor that allows users to easily edit documentation as if they were using a simple word processor. Behind the scenes, Petal is actually manipulating a highly structured and marked-up technical documentation format, namely LwDITA, but it only concerns the user with an editable view of the content. We will present a technical documentation publishing workflow that integrates Petal with GitHub to provide a simple syntax and tool-free approach for users to contribute to project documentation.