Add contributing instructions on generating HTML from markdown

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.github/contributing.md b/.github/contributing.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..e69c9b41
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.github/contributing.md
@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
+BQN documentation exists in two places: markdown files, and corresponding HTML files in the `docs/` folder. When making a fix, you can save me 20 seconds or so by re-generating HTML pages for the markdown you edit. I would much rather have a correction with no HTML than no correction, so skip this if it seems inconvenient. However, for a small change also it's easier for me to just make the fix based on a forum comment than to merge, pull, re-generate, and push.
+
+If you have [CBQN](https://github.com/dzaima/CBQN) installed as `bqn` somewhere in your shell path, you can generate files with
+
+    $ ./gendocs [file.md...]
+
+If no files are given, this builds all docs. It's a thin wrapper around `md.bqn`, and the following version lets you run without the shell path set up:
+
+    $ /path/to/BQN md.bqn file.md...
+
+With Node.js but no CBQN, you can also run JS BQN, which takes somewhere around 5 seconds plus 1-10 seconds per file.
+
+    $ ./bqn.js md.bqn file.md...