Scribble: Closing the book on ad hoc documentation tools

Scribble is a system for writing library documentation, user guides, and tutorials. It builds on PLT Scheme's technology for language extension, and at its heart is a new approach to connecting prose references with library bindings. Besides the base system, we have built Scribble libraries for JavaDoc-style API documentation, literate programming, and conference papers. We have used Scribble to produce thousands of pages of documentation for PLT Scheme; the new documentation is more complete, more accessible, and better organized, thanks in large part to Scribble's flexibility and the ease with which we cross-reference information across levels. This paper reports on the use of Scribble and on its design as both an extension and an extensible part of PLT Scheme.