Doxygen is a documentation system for C++, C, Java, Objective-C, Python, IDL (Corba and Microsoft flavors) and to some extent PHP, C#, and 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 even `abuse' 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.
This manual is divided into three parts, each of which is divided into several sections.
The first part forms a user manual:
Section Installation discusses how to download, compile and install doxygen for your platform.
Section Getting started tells you how to generate your first piece of documentation quickly.
Section Documenting the code demonstrates the various ways that code can be documented.
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.
Future work
Although doxygen is used successfully by a lot of people already, there is always room for improvement. Therefore, I have compiled a
todo/wish list
of possible and/or requested enhancements.
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 Troll Tech, for creating a beautiful GUI Toolkit (which is very useful as a Windows/Unix platform abstraction layer :-)
1.4.4
) 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.