24. Documentation

GNU Emacs Lisp has convenient on-line help facilities, most of which derive their information from the documentation strings associated with functions and variables. This chapter describes how to write good documentation strings for your Lisp programs, as well as how to write programs to access documentation.

Note that the documentation strings for Emacs are not the same thing as the Emacs manual. Manuals have their own source files, written in the Texinfo language; documentation strings are specified in the definitions of the functions and variables they apply to. A collection of documentation strings is not sufficient as a manual because a good manual is not organized in that fashion; it is organized in terms of topics of discussion.

24.1 Documentation Basics		Good style for doc strings. Where to put them. How Emacs stores them.
24.2 Access to Documentation Strings		How Lisp programs can access doc strings.
24.3 Substituting Key Bindings in Documentation		Substituting current key bindings.
24.4 Describing Characters for Help Messages		Making printable descriptions of non-printing characters and key sequences.
24.5 Help Functions		Subroutines used by Emacs help facilities.