Lowdocument

Lowdocument is a lightweight documentation generation tool designed for use in embedded and low‑resource computing environments. The software is written in C and released under the GPLv3 license, making it free and open source. It emphasizes minimal external dependencies, generating static web pages that rely only on plain HTML, very small amounts of CSS, and optional JavaScript for navigation. The input format for Lowdocument is a plain–text markup language that is simpler than traditional markup systems such as reStructuredText or Markdown, but it provides enough features to create section headings, lists, code blocks, cross‑references and embedded diagrams in the form of SVG or ASCII art.

Lowdocument was first released in 2018 and has been adopted by organizations that develop firmware, device drivers, and real‑time operating systems, where the overhead of heavier documentation tools like Doxygen or Sphinx would be impractical. The software includes a modular plugin architecture that allows developers to extend its capabilities, such as adding custom syntax for hardware registers, including link‑time documentation of API bindings, or generating API reference files in JSON format for downstream tooling. The tool also supports AsciiDoc and Markdown as optional writing formats, converting them to the Lowdocument format before rendering.

In typical usage, developers write documentation as plain text files in a project repository, run the Lowdocument command line interface to assemble and render the site, and then deploy the static files to a web server or an internal documentation portal. The lightweight design of Lowdocument reduces disk space requirements, compile times, and rendering overhead, making it suitable for continuous integration pipelines that target small microcontrollers, safety‑critical systems, or embedded Linux distributions.