There is only a path to single-source

I’m part of the technical writing team at VK WorkSpace and one of the authors of the documentation portal: https://biz.mail.ru/docs/on-premises/.

In my talk, I'll discuss how we solved the problem of a single source using a combination of 3 tools: MkDocs + Jinja2 + GitLab. We have 2 projects with 90% identical documentation. Maintaining the 10% difference used to take up half the working time of one technical writer in our team. I’ll show how we cut support costs by more than half with a single source and what challenges we solved.

• I’ll show how the source documents (in Jinja) look and how they are integrated into the output documents (in Markdown).
• How to exclude and include content for different customers.
• What to do if customers have releases at different times.
• How to change header levels if you need separate instructions and a large document.
• How to set up the development environment for working with Jinja.
• I’ll share GitLab CI for transferring source documents between repositories.