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# 1. A few thoughts on documentation

Why do we write documentation? Silly question. Because we want others to be able to use our program, library function or whatever we have written and made available. But writing documentation is not all there is to it:

- Documentation must be accessible. If it's hidden in some non-standard place where the documentation-related tools won't find it -- how can it serve its purpose?

- Documentation must be reliable and accurate. There's nothing more annoying than having program behaviour and documentation disagree. Users will curse you, send you hate mail and throw your work into the bit bucket, with the firm intent to never install anything written by that jerk again.

The historical and well known way documentation is accessed on UNIX is via the man(1) command. This HOWTO describes what you have to do to write a man page that will be correctly processed by the documentation- related tools. The most important of these tools are `man`(1), `xman`(1x), `apropos`(1), `makewhatis`(8) and `catman`(8). Reliability and accuracy of the information are, of course, up to you. But even in this respect you will find some ideas below that help you avoid some common glitches.

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