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
.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).