I'm pleased to announce the release of Declt 3.0 "Montgomery Scott", my Texinfo reference manual generator for Common Lisp libraries.

This is a new major release of the library, although the changes may not be so visible from the outside. The main concern in this release has been to increase the robustness of the output, from three different angles.

  1. Many places from where Declt attempts to extract meaningful information are underspecified (ASDF system slots notably).
  2. The pretty-printing of Lisp items can be difficult, given the liberalism and extensibility of the language.
  3. Finally, several restrictions in the syntax of Texinfo itself (anchor names notably) get in the way.

These issues were described in a paper presented at the TeX Users Group conference, this summer in Palo Alto. This release goes a long way toward fixing them.

The new generated reference manuals look mostly the same as before, but some important things have changed under the hood, notably the names of hyperlinks and cross-references (backward-incompatible, hence the increase in the major version number). The output is now also much more robust with respect to the final output format: the generation of HTML, DVI, Postscript, PDF, and even plain Info should work fine and has been tested on all Quicklisp libraries (in fact, Quickref will also be upgraded in the near future to provide all those formats at once).

Those improvements do come at a cost. Unicode is now required (even for Info readers). To be honest, many Lisp libraries already had that implicit requirement. Also, this release depends on improvements and bug fixes only available in Texinfo 6.7, now a requirement as well. I have to thank Gavin Smith, from the Texinfo team, for his collaboration.

Apart from that, this release also has a number of bug fixes.

  • Some method specializers were not handled properly.
  • The manuals were missing documentation for some non-Lisp source files.
  • There were some glitches in the pretty-printing of unreadable objects.

Get it at the usual place, and enjoy!