For the purposes of cataloging files, and recognizing their contents, it is helpful to have a few paragraphs of description. This is provided for by the docstring¸docstring attribute, which might look like this:
%%% docstring = "This LaTeXinfo document describes %%% filehdr.el, a GNU Emacs support %%% package for the creation and %%% maintenance of standard file %%% headers, such as this one. It %%% may be processed by LaTeX to %%% produce a typeset document, or by %%% M-x latexinfo-format-buffer in %%% GNU Emacs to produce an info file %%% for on-line documentation. %%% %%% The checksum field above contains %%% a CRC-16 checksum as the first %%% value, followed by the equivalent %%% of the standard UNIX wc (word %%% count) utility output of lines, %%% words, and characters. This is %%% produced by Robert Solovay's %%% checksum utility.",
This documentation need not be a user's manual for the file, unless the necessary information can be communicated in a few paragraphs of no more than a couple of thousand characters. Think of it instead as an extended abstract.¸abstract¸documentation stringas abstract
Someday, we may have tools that will extract documentation strings from standard file headers and turn them into catalogs.
email, FAX, docstring, Attribute descriptions