mdBook
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
3recommend
2warn against
Nov 2, 2025first mention
May 10, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“mdBook is great for getting a site off the ground”
“which maybe could be quite a good project idea like mdBook”
Show 2 more
“Something like mdbook (https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook) is more than enough for my needs”
“I'm currently using mdbook instead of mkdocs”
switched from MkDocson “Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Ma…”
Caveats and dissent
“Biggest problem of mdBook is the lack of the good PDF and ePub export”
“Even mdbook upgrades have been a pain since we need to merge down theme updates.”
Often compared with
Threads where it came up
- Plugins case study: mdBook preprocessors 4 mentions
- Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (May 2026) 1 mention
- Show HN: ApexStore – An embedded LSM-Tree storage engine written in Rust 1 mention
- Linux Kernel Explorer 1 mention
- Markdown is holding you back 1 mention
- Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes 1 mention
Also written as mdbook. Data: mdbook.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 11
“mdBook is great for getting a site off the ground”
“I have documented the architecture using mdBook”
Quarto handles both beautifully, just look at their gallery[1]. [1] https://quarto.org/docs/gallery/
“Mdbook passes a version and the renderer/preprocessor can/should do a version check.”
“Biggest problem of mdBook is the lack of the good PDF and ePub export”
What is missing from markdown? mdbook also uses in some parts the GH flavored one, so you can create notes [1] and similar. On top of that, you can add support for Mermaid. Personally, I don't think you need more than that for 90% of the documentation, but I'm happy to hear more about your use case. [1]: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/16925
“which maybe could be quite a good project idea like mdBook”
“Something like mdbook (https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook) is more than enough for my needs”
“I'm currently using mdbook instead of mkdocs”
“I also started an mdbook about some of the stuff I've done”
“Even mdbook upgrades have been a pain since we need to merge down theme updates.”