freesewing/markdown/dev/guides/docs/en.md

---
title: How we structure our documentation
---

Whether you're writing documentation for FreeSewing or merely trying
to find what you are looking for, understanding how we structure our
documentation can help you find your feet and figure out what goes where.

## Types of documentation

Our documentation is divided into four different types:

- [**Tutorials**](/tutorials) are lessons that lead you through a series of steps to complete a project.
- [**Guides**](/guides) tell a story to further your understanding of a specific topic.
- [**Howtos**](/howtos) give you concrete steps to solve a common problem or challenge.
- [**Reference**](/reference) holds technical descriptions of the underlying technology and how to make use of it.

Each time you write documentation, you have to ask yourself: Is it a tutorial? Is it a Guide?
Is it a Howto? Or, is it Reference documentation?

If you find it hard to answer that question, the illustration below might help you figure out
where your documentation should go based on what it's trying to accomplish:

![A graphic showing a visual representation of our documentation
structure](docs.png "A visual representation of how our documentation is structured")

- Write a **Tutorial** is your aim is to help people learn the platform
- Write a **Guide** if your aim is to further people's understanding of a topic by going a bit deeper
- Write a **Howto** if your aim is to help people accomplish a task
- Write **Reference** documentation to detail how things work under the hood
- Refer people to **Discord** or **GitHub** for things that are not (yet) covered in our documentation

<Note>

##### Based on a talk by Daniele Procida

This structure is loosely based
on [this talk by Daniele Procida](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4vKPhjcMZg) at
PyCon AU 2017.

</Note>