GAPDoc/README.md

GAPDoc

This package describes a document format for writing GAP documentation.

The idea is to define a sufficiently abstract markup language for GAP documentation which can be (relatively easily) converted into different output formats. We used XML to define such a language.

This package provides:

• Utilities to use the documentation which is written in GAPDoc format with the GAP help system. If you don't want to write your own (package) documentation you can skip to the last point of this list.
• The description of a markup language for GAP documentation (which is defined using the XML standard).
• Three example documents using this language: The GAPDoc documentation itself, a short example which demonstrates all constructs defined in the GAPDoc language, and a very short example explained in the introduction of the main documentation.
• A mechanism for distributing documentation among several files, including source code files.
• GAP programs (written by the first named author) which produce from documentation written in the GAPDoc language several document formats:
  • text format with color markup for onscreen browsing.
  • LaTeX format and from this PDF- (and DVI)-versions with hyperlinks.
  • HTML (XHTML 1.0 strict) format for reading with a Web-browser (and many hooks for CSS layout).
• Utility GAP programs which are used for the above but can be of independent interest as well:
  • Unicode strings with translations to and from other encodings
  • further utilities for manipulating strings
  • tools for dealing with BibTeX data
  • another data format BibXMLext for bibliographical data including tools to manipulate/translate them
  • a tool ComposedDocument for composing documents which are distributed in many files