# How I Wrote These Docs

Obsidian makes it very easy to write technical documentation and help files. The
helpfiles for Obsidian were all written in Obsidian from the earliest beta!

Here's how I do it:

- The linking methodology makes it very easy to just write as you go without having
to stop to think about whether or not you've covered something. When you're in the
flow of writing and talk about something like [[Contextual Lenses]] in a sentence,
you don't have to make a reminder to create a page about that. Just put brackets
around the things you need to talk about more, and when you are done with your
current note, click on them, and your new pages are ready to be written.

- When your docs start to get more complicated, and you want to begin categorizing
pages, you can easily move files around in whatever directory structure makes sense
to you. Obsidian's automatic link updating means that your links will still work.
We realized pretty early on that the List of Plugins needed their own directory,
and by the time you read this I may or may not have decided to classify them by
type in subdirectories.

- Screenshots to demonstrate features can be dragged into a document directly, and

automatically saved in your default attachment folder. All of your images are in
one place, ready to go.

- Since your docs are in Markdown, it is simple to export them to whatever format
is needed. I have a series of [[Scripts for Building TOC files]] that will, with a
few adjustments for whatever export tool you are using, generate markdown files
ready for transclusion into a single HTML or PDF file, if, for some reason, one
wanted to read the documentation not in Obsidian. There's still some work to be
done converting internal links to links to sections for html, but that should be a
straightforward search and replace.

- With multiple vaults, it's easy to have a custom set of plugins or CSS that you
prefer for working on large-scale projects. This also means that you don't have to
worry about link cross-contamination between the documentation and your personal
notes.