17 Herramientas de documentación del paquete LaTeX

In this chapter we describe the doc system, a method to document LaTEX macros and environments. A large proportion of the LaTEX code available is documented using its conventions and support tools. The underlying principle is that LaTEX code and comments are mixed in the same file and that the documentation or the stripped package file or files are obtained from the latter in a standard way. In this chapter we explain the structure that these files should have and show how, together with the program docstrip, you can build self-installing procedures for distributing your LaTEX packages and generating the associated documentation. The chapter also helps you understand the code written by others, install it with ease, and produce the documentation for it (not necessarily in that order).

The third section then introduces the l3build program, which offers a flexible development environment. It supports a package developer in all important steps: code and documentation development, testing, and all aspects of the release management including upload to CTAN. It is the workflow environment used by the LaTEX Project Team for the code that they manage.

We end the chapter with a section on version control systems and explain how to extract and use their information with LaTEX. Applying version control methods is definitely useful for any larger documentation project, but in fact is advisable for any document that goes through a number of “revisions”.