Generate documentation from source code
Doxygen is a documentation system for C++, C, Java, Objective-C, Python, IDL (Corba and Microsoft flavors), Fortran, VHDL, PHP, C#, and to some extent D.
It can help you in three ways:
- It can generate an on-line documentation browser (in HTML) and/or an off-line reference manual (in ) from a set of documented source files. There is also support for generating output in RTF (MS-Word), PostScript, hyperlinked PDF, compressed HTML, and Unix man pages. The documentation is extracted directly from the sources, which makes it much easier to keep the documentation consistent with the source code.
- You can configure doxygen to extract the code structure from undocumented source files. This is very useful to quickly find your way in large source distributions. You can also visualize the relations between the various elements by means of include dependency graphs, inheritance diagrams, and collaboration diagrams, which are all generated automatically.
- You can also use doxygen for creating normal documentation (as I did for this manual).
Doxygen is developed under Linux and Mac OS X, but is set-up to be highly portable. As a result, it runs on most other Unix flavors as well. Furthermore, executables for Windows are available.
Doxygen license
Copyright © 1997-2012 by Dimitri van Heesch.
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation under the terms of the GNU General Public License is hereby granted. No representations are made about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
Documents produced by doxygen are derivative works derived from the input used in their production; they are not affected by this license.
User examples
Doxygen supports a number of output formats where HTML is the most popular one. I've gathered some nice examples of real-life projects using doxygen.
These are part of a larger list of projects that use doxygen. If you know other projects, let me know and I'll add them.
Commercial Support
I'm currently investigating the possibilities of providing commercial support for doxygen. The forms of support I'm thinking of are:
- implementing features,
- fixing bugs,
- providing priority help in answering questions.
To get a better understanding of the feasibility, please let me know if you have a need for this type (or another type) of doxygen related commercial support.
Future work
Although doxygen is successfully used by large number of companies and open source projects already, there is always room for improvement.
You can submit enhancement requests in the bug tracker. Make sure the severity of the bug report is set to "enhancement".
Acknowledgements
Thanks go to:
- Malte Zöckler and Roland Wunderling, authors of DOC++. The first version of doxygen borrowed some code of an old version of DOC++. Although I have rewritten practically all code since then, DOC++ has still given me a good start in writing doxygen.
- All people at Qt Software, for creating a beautiful GUI Toolkit (which is very useful as a Windows/Unix platform abstraction layer :-)
- My brother Frank for rendering the logos.
- Harm van der Heijden for adding HTML help support.
- Wouter Slegers of Your Creative Solutions for registering the www.doxygen.org domain.
- Parker Waechter for adding the RTF output generator.
- Joerg Baumann, for adding conditional documentation blocks, PDF links, and the configuration generator.
- Tim Mensch for adding the todo command.
- Christian Hammond for redesigning the web-site.
- Ken Wong for providing the HTML tree view code.
- Talin for adding support for C# style comments with XML markup.
- Petr Prikryl for coordinating the internationalization support. All language maintainers for providing translations into many languages.
- The band Porcupine Tree for providing hours of great music to listen to while coding.
- Andrea Schulte for translating part of the web page to German.
- Jan Milz for mirroring the tar ball.
- Techfacts.de for their long time contribution and support.
- many, many others for suggestions, patches and bug reports.