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1.1 Getting Started

This manual documents the GPGME library programming interface. All functions and data types provided by the library are explained.

The reader is assumed to possess basic knowledge about cryptography in general, and public key cryptography in particular. The underlying cryptographic engines that are used by the library are not explained, but where necessary, special features or requirements by an engine are mentioned as far as they are relevant to GPGME or its users.

This manual can be used in several ways. If read from the beginning to the end, it gives a good introduction into the library and how it can be used in an application. Forward references are included where necessary. Later on, the manual can be used as a reference manual to get just the information needed about any particular interface of the library. Experienced programmers might want to start looking at the examples at the end of the manual, and then only read up those parts of the interface which are unclear.

The documentation for the language bindings is currently not included in this manual. Those languages bindings follow the general programming model of GPGME but may provide some extra high level abstraction on top of the GPGME style API. For now please see the README files in the lang/ directory of the source distribution.