GAP has three main GAP manuals (they are called "main" to distinguish them from package manuals that are maintained by the authors of the respective packages):

• GAP Tutorial
• GAP Reference Manual
• HPC-GAP Reference Manual

These manuals are written in GAPDoc format, provided by the GAPDoc package. Their source is contained in the directories doc/tut, doc/ref and doc/hpc respectively. Some documentation is also stored in the library files to be kept close to the code it describes. It is included in the manual using the mechanism documented here.

There is also a document describing Changes from Earlier Versions.

The official GAP distribution includes all documentation, so there is no need to build it after GAP installation. However, if you need to build the development version of main GAP manuals from this repository, you need to perform the following steps:

• build GAP by calling ./configure; make
• ensure that the GAPDoc package is present in the pkg subdirectory (for example, by creating a symlink pkg pointing to the pkg directory of the installation of the latest GAP release).
• build manuals by calling make doc

This will build the manuals. Each of them will be built twice to ensure that cross-references between manuals are resolved.

Each of these directories contain a file makedocrel.g. You may read it into GAP if you want to build faster just one manual to see how your changes look like, or if GAPDoc reports an error in the XML code that you want to debug. Then you may call make doc as a final check at a later stage.