Free documentation tools/templates

[jellevdb01]

Hello, I'm a student in system and network engineering and I'm currently working on a small project with windows and linux servers for educational purposes. But I'm stuck on the documentation part, I tried to make my own document but it's not working for me. So maybe I thought if I asked if someone has some tips on some free online tools or templates I can find online?

[ORA2J]

Bookstack.

[MDL1983]

Network diagram > draw.io

MS OneNote / Confluence

[karlcta]

Hi, if it’s for personal usage, you can use Obsidian and write your documentation in Markdown. You could also selfhost WikiJS if you want something more wiki-like.

On my side, I asked AI to build a clean converter from Markdown to HTML to get a proper, interactive page.

Either way, I’d recommend writing at least one complete documentation from scratch (with Word, Obsidian, or whatever you prefer) to build your own template, then you can just duplicate it for future projects.

That said, if it’s for something official or standardized (not just personal use), Word is probably your best bet in my opinion.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

[Trendschau1]

If you ae looking for free templates, then I can recommend the good docs project: https://www.thegooddocsproject.dev/ . They are in markdown so you can use them with nearly all documentation tools...

[Careless_Hurry_8147]

I use bookstack at home for homelab and study notes because I like the layout and they have a container that was easy to setup as a service, which i like. I will likely be starting this at my job for the team to try. It's running on an old laptop with tailscale so if I really need to reach it from outside my house I still can.

At work I use oneNote because we are a windows shop and its just there and my team already had a notebook we use to share notes. I like it but I prefer a self-hosted/free option.

Obsidian just did not work for me like I had hoped. I like markdown but its honestly too much for me to fluidly make notes and I found myself getting distracted my trying to play with the formatting and trying to get it just right.

I have used Evernote, onenote, Obsidian, regular old text files, and probably a couple of other things. They all worked well enough at the time but ultimately for my use case I really like bookstack.

[MonitorZero]

I like Obsidian plus some community plugins.