Google Season of Docs
BRL-CAD is excited by the inaugural 2019 Google Season of Docs (GSoD)!
If you are interested in working with BRL-CAD on a documentation project, whether under GSoD or not, please see our PROJECT IDEAS.
Despite a rich documentation and development history (see our bibliography), BRL-CAD's docs are lacking in several fundamental respects such as introductory materials for new users, basic organization, and presentation. Over the past 20 years, the project has received a deficiency of attention from contributors with technical writing expertise, professional or otherwise.
In all, BRL-CAD has more than a million words of documentation across hundreds of manual pages, dozens of tutorials, hundreds of wiki pages, dozens of technical papers, and other resources. There are literally thousands of features created over decades of development. BRL-CAD's set of current manuals, guides, tutorials, and other documentation are listed on our website wiki.
Despite such a tremendous amount of documentation, there remain large gaps particularly for new users. We especially need help with:
- presenting existing documentation in a more organized manner
- creating documentation that specifically caters to new users
- getting all existing documentation under version control
- setting up round-trip editing of documentation
A good starting point for any technical writers interested in working on BRL-CAD is our "HACKING BRL-CAD" book which can be accessed at http://brlcad.org/HACKING_BRL-CAD.pdf (35MB)
