One truly wonderful aspect of Quartz is how much rich, powerful, reader-facing functionality is baked into the product. Backlinks, breadcrumbs, callouts, and popover previews can all be generated automatically or programmatically from your Markdown. LaTeX and Mermaid diagram support also come packed in, along with powerful user-facing features like type-to-search and single-page app routing to avoid flashes of unstyled content when navigating. You can also author your own plugins in TypeScript.
MkDocs
Built with Python, MkDocs is one of the simpler Markdown documentation generators out there. It doesn’t have many core features, but it’s massively extensible through a rich plugin ecosystem.
MkDocs does not have a standalone installer but runs from within a Python environment, and can be set up there with pip install mkdocs
. It does, however, provide a command-line tool, available in the Python environment, to run the program and issue commands. mkdocs new <directory>
creates a new, minimal documentation project in the provided directory, and mkdocs serve
runs a local web server to display the documentation project in the current directory.