Using Visual Studio Code to update the Indicia Manual

There are many different environments you could set up on your computer to edit Restructured Text (RST). The simplest and most effective we have found is to use Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and, optionally, an extension called ‘reStructuredText’ that lets you to preview RST in a form closer to what readers of the Indicia Manual will eventually see.

Since VS Code is a cross-platform tool available for Windows, MacOS and Linux, we can safely recommend it to most people who want to contribute jo the Indicia documentation.

You can read about VS Code (which is free to use) and install it from the Visual Studio Code website. VS Code is a lightweight code that can be used to produce code in many different languages. Furthermore a large number of extensions (plugins) are available to support language-specific features, including several for RST.

You can experiment yourself with the different RST extensions, but we have found the ‘reStructuredText’ extension from LeXtudio to provide a reasonable fast preview feature.

VS Code also offers integrated source control with through Git. You can use these integrated GUI features to link with the Indicia GitHub repositories. If you prefer to use Git from the command line, VS Code includes integrated terminal windows that are very convenient for this.

For additional information see

• Contributing to the Documentation - a Tutorial