Markdown?

[Ranfir]

What are your thoughts on creating a markdown version of the helpfiles, and then using a script to process them to conform with the current format?

I'm not sure how this would fit into the longer term vision of moving to Sphinx.

[anhegofcherek]

I'm not sure I see the value - can you elaborate please?

[Ranfir]

Compared to the status quo, it would be an easy way to enforce consistency of formatting across helpfiles, while providing something that already renders nicely to the web. It would provide an easy way to separate formatting concerns from the content.

Writing a script to process the Markdown files into something that renders nicely in-game is something that doesn't have to be tied to the game's codebase (i.e. anybody can help do it without access to the game's codebase).

Also, Markdown is more popular than Sphinx, so it would likely be easier to crowd-source help. Markdown already renders on GitHub, and GitHub provides an editor such that people can contribute directly through the GitHub website.

Sphinx does seem to be a better technical fit if the only target was the game, but I suspect that Markdown might have its merits once you consider everything else.

[anhegofcherek]

With one exception, everything you've said here applies to Sphinx/rST

It is fair to say that:

Markdown is more popular than Sphinx

but I don't think people will have too much of a problem with rST, and the bottleneck is more likely to be people's time and energy - like right now it's plain text and there hasn't been contribution since October