The documentation that comes with the [Tcl] and [Tk] distributions
is commonly referred to as the ''man pages'' or as ''reference
documentation''.  The form of this documentations is a generally
brief page describing a particular command, its arguments, and
a description of what the command does.

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The format of the pages is a text markup language frequently referred
to as ''*roff man'' - shorthand for nroff/troff and manual macro set.  
It is one of the most common formats on Unix-like systems for documenting
the basic invocation and argument options for a program or a command
within a program.


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Among the ways to access "the manual pages" are
   * conventional Unix installations ... man ...
   * conventional Windows installation ... (see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tcldocs/files/ for a download of .chm files for Windows which include more than just Tcl/Tk)
   * PDF from ftp://tcl.activestate.com/pub/tcl/doc/TclTkElRef803.pdf or a version for Tcl 8.4.2 from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tcldocs/files/tcl8.4.2%2B%2B.pdf.gz 
   * www.tcl.tk page [http://www.tcl.tk/man/]
   * neat [JCW]-authored scripted documents at [http://www.equi4.com/pub/dok/]
   * http://tmml.sf.net/coredocs.html
   * [TkMan]


Translated manual pages
   * [TclTk russian manual pages]
   * TclTk french manual pages [http://www.larochelle-innovation.com/tcltk/manuel]

The fundamental "charter" manpage is of course called Tcl (nickname "[Endekalogue]"). The Wiki Endekalogue page lists translations (of the Tcl reference page) to more languages.

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When writing documentation, a developer has to decide in what form to provide the documentation.  There are various tools available to assist in this.

There is a tool called txt2man (see http://freshmeat.net/projects/txt2man/) which is said to convert plain ASCII text into man page format.

There are Tcl specific tools, such as [dtp]/[doctools] software, which
provides the ability to write doc in a general form, then to generate various
file formats for display purposes.


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[Category Documentation]

For instance, [TMML] and [dtp] are two tools designed to help Tcl developers
document Tcl extensions and applications.