Documentation

All applications should provide documentation to help their users understand the application and troubleshoot problems that may arise. While a well-designed application should not require reading the documentation before use, documentation can nonetheless be an important tool for users, particularly for complex applications.

GNOME provides a unified framework for providing user documentation. You can provide documentation in the industry-standard DocBook format. Using DocBook means that you don't have to worry about formatting details. Instead, your documentation will be automatically formatted with the same consistent conventions as the rest of the system documentation.

GNOME's help viewer, Yelp, displays and prints documentation, provides a listing of all documentation on the system, and allows the user to search the full text of all documentation. Using the GNOME help system gives you all these features for free.

For more information on writing documentation for your application, see the GNOME Handbook of Writing Software Documentation, DocBook: The Definitive Guide, and the GNOME Documentation Style Guide.