Doculator

The idea came from a post by LaCroix Design Co, a fellow Chicago studio, on how they streamlined their proposal writing. It got me thinking about how we put ours together at Sandbox, and The Doculator grew out of that: documents written in Markdown, with boilerplate sections pulled in from their own files, and a stylesheet that keeps everything consistently branded.

I started with Marked 2, which previews Markdown and can pull in other files. In the end I preferred iA Writer. Its way of including one file in another is cleaner, and I found switching between writing and the finished preview easier. Marked 3 could be better, but I haven’t tried it yet.

The key feature in both is that a CSS theme handles the design. Writers who don’t design never have to learn a tool like InDesign, and designers don’t have to stop and typeset a quick two-pager. It helped with docs beyond the proposals. When maintaining documents’ style became accessible to the whole group all our client-facing documents became much more polished and consistent.

It’s also aged well. AI tools write Markdown easily, so they can draft straight into the system. And because the theme handles the design and the app makes the PDF, there’s no need to ask the AI to lay anything out or build a file, which is slow and costly in tokens. iA Writer has a feature where text inputs are color-coded which makes it easy to see what has been reviewed and updated by the team from the original generated draft.

Next, I’m hoping for a way to set variables for a document, like a publish date set ahead of time, and use them throughout the text, much like front matter in a static site generator. iA Writer doesn’t currently offer this feature, and possibly at this point it’s worth building my own tool.