Anyone needing to design web pages, PostScript/PDF files or Info documents can use Skribilo. In particular, there is no need for programming skills in order to use Skribilo. Skribilo can be used as any text description languages such as LaTeX, Lout or HTML.

There are three main reasons for using Skribilo:

• It is easier to type in Skribilo texts than other text description formats. The need for meta keywords, that is, words used to describe the structure of the text and not the text itself, is very limited.
• Skribilo is highly skilled for computing texts. It is very common that one needs to automatically produce parts of the text. This can be very simple such as, for instance, the need to include inside a text, the date of the last update or the number of the last revision. Sometimes it may be more complex. For instance, one may be willing to embed inside a text the result of a complex arithmetic computation. Or even, you may want to include some statistics about that text, such as, the number of words, paragraphs, sections, and so on. Skribilo makes these sort of text manipulation easy whereas other systems rely on the use of text preprocessors.
• The same source file can be compiled to various output formats such as HTML, PostScript, Info pages, etc.

Skribilo is based on Skribe, which was designed and implemented by Manuel Serrano and Érick Gallesio. Although it departs from it on some aspects, it shares the overall design and philosophy. Érick and Manuel described the main design decisions behind Skribe in a paper published in the 2005 Journal of Functional Programming (JFP) entitled Skribe: A Functional Authoring Language. Although parts of the paper are slightly outdated, it gives a very good idea of Skribilo's innards, and notably contains a description of the 3 stages of documentation ``evaluation''.