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.

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, varying line wrap widths, misaligned table columns.

Refactoring

Refactor your project as it grows and as its needs change. Zensical Studio already supports consistent renaming operations for headers, link labels, footnotes, and abbredications. You can also rename and move files wihtout creating broken links.

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

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.

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.

Content Import

Standard Markdown editing functionality pastes text as pain 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 authors 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.

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.

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.

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 access 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.