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4 Overview ¶

Declt is implemented as a 3 stages pipeline, as depicted in the figure below. The declt function, already mentioned in Quick Start triggers the whole pipeline, but for more advanced usage, each stage of the pipeline can be accessed separately and directly via their respective entry point functions: assess, assemble, and typeset.

1. The first stage of the pipeline is called the assessment stage. At this stage, Declt loads the library, and then introspects the Lisp environment in order to extract the pertinent information. This information is stored in a so-called report. See Assessment for more information.
2. The second stage of the pipeline is called the assembly stage. At this stage, Declt organizes the (completely flat) information provided by a report in a specific way. The result is called a script. A script begins to look like a properly organized reference manual, but it is still independent from the final output format. The specific organization scheme to use is called a layout. See Assembly for more information.
3. Finally, the third stage of the pipeline is called the typesetting stage. At this stage, Declt renders a script to a file by typesetting its contents in a specific documentation format. This may directly result in a human-readable reference manual, although in the case of Texinfo, the resulting file needs additional post-processing. This, however, is not done by Declt itself, but by makeinfo, which is an external tool. See Typesetting for more information.

Again, when you call (declt system), the 3 stages of the pipeline are chained automatically, which is more or less equivalent to calling (typeset (assemble (assess system))) (see Global Usage).