Contributing to StrictDoc

Contributions to StrictDoc are welcome and appreciated. Presented below is a condensed checklist that summarises the information of the development guide, see 🔗 1. Getting started.

Before opening your Pull Request, the contributor is encouraged to do the following steps:

1. Run invoke check tasks locally. This task calls several lint and test scripts and it is the very task that is run by the GitHub CI process.
2. A contribution that contains changes to the StrictDoc's codebase shall also include tests that exercise the changed behavior. A contribution without any tests is unlikely to be accepted (with the exception of "code climate" changes, see 🔗 5. Python code).
3. Follow the conventions of the section 🔗 6. Git workflow. A clean Git history and conventional commit names are expected for every single contribution.
4. If the contribution is not trivial, read through the complete development guide.
5. If the contribution is not trivial, please update the Release Notes with a high-level summary of your contribution. Refer to the release notes from previous releases for guidance on what information is desirable.

If you like the StrictDoc project and use it in your daily work, there are several things you could do besides contributing Pull Requests:

• Star the StrictDoc repository to show your appreciation of the project.
• Write a blog post or a tutorial about using StrictDoc to achieve some goal.
• Write an email to s.pankevich@gmail.com and mettta@gmail.com and tell us how you are using StrictDoc and which features you are missing. We somewhat lack enough feedback from our users.

The existing capability of StrictDoc to export/import SDoc to ReqIF is very basic. If you have to deal with ReqIF and you experience errors/crashes when using StrictDoc against ReqIF files, feel free to contribute the anonymized ReqIF files via StrictDoc Issues on GitHub, and we will take care of your specific case.

It is straightforward to create an anonymized version of a ReqIF file. Just reduce your file to the section that causes troubles in import or export and replace all your business-specific titles/texts to some Lorem ipsum... boilerplate, see https://www.loremipsum.de/.

The existing template for generating PDF documents using Sphinx looks like this: https://strictdoc.readthedocs.io/_/downloads/en/latest/pdf/. The template is maintained in a separate repository: https://github.com/strictdoc-project/sphinx-latex-reqspec-template and does a good job but could be improved in terms of look and structure used.

If you are an expert and have experience of customizing Sphinx/TeX templates, consider providing feedback or contributing patches.

One extreme way of improving the generated output could be to take the Sphinx template for TeX files and fully customize what Sphinx does to produce a PDF. See https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/latex.html.