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Roadmap

Zensical Studio is part of a vertically integrated set of systems that allow us to rethink all aspects of the authoring (AX), developer (DX), and user (UX) experience in the Docs-as-Code space. Its functionality is an important part of the authoring experience we deliver with the Zensical family of projects.

This roadmap focuses on Zensical Studio. Read it in conjunction with the broader roadmap for Zensical.

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Auto-formatting

Consistency in how Markdown is written can increase readability, prevent mistakes, and make it easier to onboard new contributors.

Our Markdown auto-formatter will remove formatting from the list of things people need to worry about and can argue about. Right now, Markdown files accumulate small inconsistencies almost by accident: mixed list markers (- vs *), uneven heading spacing, trailing whitespace, misaligned table columns.

  • Normalize list markers to one consistent style
  • Normalize spacing around headings
  • Remove trailing whitespace
  • Align table columns and cell padding
  • Preserve indentation of nested tabs, admonitions, and details blocks
  • Keep formatting stable, so a second run makes no further changes

Refactoring

Refactor your project as it grows and as its needs change. Zensical Studio already supports consistent renaming operations for headings, link labels, footnotes, and abbreviations. You can also rename and move files without creating broken links.

We will extend the range of refactoring operations. The aim is to support you as your project evolves.

  • Rename a heading and update every incoming link
  • Rename a reference or image label
  • Rename a footnote
  • Rename an abbreviation
  • Rename a tab anchor or a named snippet section
  • Move or rename a file, with links and snippet paths updated automatically
  • Extract an inline link or image to a reference-style definition
  • Make a heading anchor explicit and stable

Business rules and authoring styles

Whether you are looking to enforce a common authoring style or need to meet legal requirements, business rules in Zensical Studio will help you ship documentation you can trust.

Equally, coherent authoring style is an important quality criterion for technical documentation and Zensical Studio will help you ensure content matches your criteria. In particular, this makes onboarding new staff or other contributors much easier.

  • Prose and style linting

Migration tooling

As the adoption of Zensical increases, teams face the task of migrating from other systems, not least from Material for MkDocs. We will include tools to support important migration tasks right in Zensical Studio.

  • Assisted migration from Material for MkDocs and other systems

Content Import

Standard Markdown editing functionality pastes text as plain text and tables without the necessary markup that turns it into a Markdown table. Zensical Studio will convert data pasted into the editor into valid Markdown where possible. Together with auto-formatting, this saves you the hassle of having to format tables manually or having to re-apply links and other markup to imported text.

Existing content carries over cleanly, no syntax wrangling required.

  • Convert pasted rich text or HTML into Markdown
  • Convert pasted tabular data into a Markdown table

Modular authoring

Zensical will support modular authoring, from simple reuse cases using snippets to fully-fledged topic-based authoring. Zensical Studio will resolve inclusion and conditionals before link validation in order to produce accurate validation and completions even in advanced use cases.

  • Compose Markdown from other files, including a named section selector
  • Navigate, validate, rename, and find references for reused content
  • Resolve inclusion and conditionals before link validation, so validation and completions stay accurate in advanced use cases
  • Select a projection or profile and preview the assembled result
  • Support conditional content and named fragments as first-class, navigable Markdown structure
  • Compare projections and identify the pages a change affects

Preview and WYSIWYG

Markdown preview shows immediately how the content will render when published. However, existing preview extensions do not support Python Markdown or its extensions. They are not aware of settings that affect the rendering and so give only basic approximation of what the result will look like.

The logical next step is to offer a complete vision editing experience. We have already laid the foundations for this in how we parse Python Markdown content.

  • Live preview that stays in sync with the editor as you write
  • Render tabs, math, Mermaid, snippets, emoji, icons, and sanitized HTML
  • Preserve source mapping from the rendered preview back to authored Markdown
  • Non-fatal render diagnostics instead of a crashed preview
  • Full WYSIWYG editing directly in the rendered view
  • Support for custom themes, plugins, and JavaScript in preview

Collaboration

The Docs-as-Code approach makes use of version-control and practices such as pull request to organize work. We will add to this support for team collaboration that is more immediate and more accessible for technical writers.

AI assistance

Generative AI can play a range of roles in technical writing, from the production of first drafts based on rough notes to checking grammar, spelling, consistency, and coherence. At the same time, your documentation is increasingly accessed not by human readers directly but consumed by AI agents first.

Writing for both audiences at the same time can be challenging and we will add features to Zensical Studio to make this task easier. We have outlined our thinking on this in ZAP-009: Structured Docs for the Agentic Era.