Using SGML to produce reusable technical documentation

The approach to the production of technical documentation described, arose from a need to supply documentation for a large library of mathematical software. The library has evolved over a period of twenty years and for most of that period the documentation has consisted of printed volumes describing the software routines and the mathematical algorithms on which they are based. In recent years there has been an increasing demand from the users of such software to receive documentation in both printed and online forms. There is also a need to vary the technical content of the documentation. The requirements discussed above have been addressed by developing a database which contains all the information necessary to generate and maintain the technical documentation for mathematical software libraries. The database is an object-oriented model of the software products, containing source code, technical information about the software and small fragments of text marked up in SGML. The database can now be used to generate both the original documents and new documents with varying style, format or content. It also makes the information held in the original documents accessible through regular database queries