JetBrains, a company that makes software designed for project management and integrated development environments for various programming languages, today announced the early-access launch of Writerside, an authoring and publishing solution for technical documentation.

Developers spend a lot of time coding and building new products, services and technologies, but all of this code needs to be maintained after it’s completed and that means documenting what it does and how it does it.

Certainly, that means best practices when writing it and adding in line comments, but it also means working with technical writers who provide product documentation, application programming interface references, tutorials, developer guides and how-tos that will assist future developers in using the code or tools.

Now, with Writerside, the ability to author these documents is being brought directly into the JetBrains IDE, where developers write their code, and as a standalone tool. Using the tool simplifies the preparation of documentation across the entire lifecycle by giving technical writers access to the same tools as developers, such as Git, build pipelines and automated checks.

“With Writerside, we want to empower writers with the tools that developers have long been using,” said product lead Anna Gasparyan. “Unfortunately, documentation is still often overlooked, and technical writers don’t get the acknowledgement or the support they deserve.”

Documentation is so important to developer productivity and customer satisfaction that it can make or break the adoption of a product. Developers see productivity boosts of almost 50% with easy-to-understand documentation, according to a 2022 report from GitHub. “Our mission is to bridge the gap between developers and writers and make documentation a team sport,” said Gasparyan.

To make Writerside documents as extensible as possible, the tool allows for the use of Markdown and semantic XML-based markup, and the ability to combine the two. This means that the elements can query and pull up links to functions and code, jumping back to API references and document sections.

Everything is also reusable, including smaller pieces of content or entire sections. It’s possible to have a section set so that it needs to be updated only once and change everywhere, or have it conditionally updated according to a set rule.

There are more than 100 different built-in tests that allow Writerside to test automatically for broken links, missing resources, incorrect attributes and more. This way writers will have a chance to know if the document doesn’t match in-house style or other elements of branding before it goes to publish, that way it remains consistent across the entire property.

Authors will be able to see documents exactly as they will appear to readers, without waiting for a render, including in custom styles, and a preview function will highlight potential errors, which makes testing easier. This extends to entire website constructions, which makes it possible to see if there are navigation errors, and it’s accessible in the browser.

Users who want to style their own experience in Writerside have not been left out, with customization options including light and dark mode, contract, soft or vivid skins. Companies can also brand the output to fit their company aesthetic, which means writers can get along with producing documentation and not have to worry about styles, layout or CSS.

Under the hood, Writerside also includes its own artificial intelligence-based spellchecker and grammar correction tool from JetBrains designed to keep writers in the flow of writing. Currently it supports more than 25 languages, including English, German, Spanish and Chinese.

Writerside is available today in early-access mode as a plugin for JetBrains IDEs and as a standalone application, which can provider writers with professional authoring capabilities.

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