Technical Manual Toolkit (TMT)

Technical Manual Toolkit (TMT) is a command-line application for creating, validating, and building structured technical manuals.

The project produces professional documentation in a consistent and repeatable way, publishing both Markdown and HTML output from plain Markdown source files.

Features

• Initialise a new technical manual project (tmt init)
• Validate project structure (tmt validate)
• Generate a compiled Markdown manual (build/manual.md)
• Publish a standalone HTML manual (build/manual.html)
• Quality gate validation for figures, tables, appendices, and cross-references
• Build report in text, Markdown, or HTML format
• Standard library only — no external dependencies

Requirements

• Python 3.11 or newer

Installation

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/alsalamon/tmt.git
cd tmt

Install the package:

pip install -e .

Verify the installation:

python -m tmt --version

See INSTALL.md for full installation details.

Quick Start

# 1. Create a new project
mkdir my-manual && cd my-manual
python -m tmt init

# 2. Edit your content
edit manuscript/chapters/01-introduction.md

# 3. Validate the project
python -m tmt validate

# 4. Build the manual
python -m tmt build

# 5. Open the result
open build/manual.html

See QUICKSTART.md for a step-by-step guide.

Available Commands

Typical Workflow

tmt init        →  Create project structure
  ↓
Author content  →  Edit manuscript files
  ↓
tmt validate    →  Check project structure
  ↓
tmt build       →  Compile and publish
  ↓
build/manual.md
build/manual.html

Project Structure

my-manual/
│
├── manuscript/
│   ├── chapters/
│   └── appendices/
│
├── assets/
│   └── images/
│
├── data/
├── docs/
├── build/
│   ├── manual.md
│   └── manual.html
│
├── tmt.toml
├── README.md
├── CHANGELOG.md
└── ROADMAP.md

Documentation

• INSTALL.md — Installation guide
• QUICKSTART.md — Quick start guide
• USER-GUIDE.md — Full user guide
• RELEASE-NOTES.md — Release notes

Tests

Run all unit tests:

python -m pytest

License

See the LICENSE file included in the project.