Building main GAP manuals

GAP has three main GAP manuals (they are called "main" to distinguish them from package manuals that are maintained by the authors of the respective packages):

• GAP Tutorial
• GAP Reference Manual
• Changes from Earlier Versions
• GAP Development Manual
• HPC-GAP Reference Manual

These manuals are written in GAPDoc format, provided by the GAPDoc package. Their source is contained in the directories doc/tut, doc/ref, doc/changes, doc/dev, and doc/hpc respectively. Some documentation is also stored in the library files to be kept close to the code it describes. It is included in the manual using the mechanism documented here.

The official GAP distribution includes all documentation, so there is no need to build it after GAP installation. However, if you need to build the development version of main GAP manuals from this repository, you need to perform the following steps:

• build GAP by calling ./autogen.sh; ./configure; make
• ensure that the GAPDoc package is present in the pkg subdirectory (you can call make bootstrap-pkg-minimal to download it).
• build manuals by calling make doc

This will build all manuals. Each of them will be built twice to ensure that cross-references between manuals are resolved.

Each of these three directories contains a file makedocrel.g. You may read it into GAP if you quickly want to build just one manual to see how your changes look like, or if GAPDoc reports an error in the XML code that you want to debug. Then you may call make doc as a final check at a later stage.