Source code documentation generator tool

Doxygen is a documentation system for C++, C, Java, Objective-C, Python, IDL (Corba and Microsoft flavors), Fortran, VHDL, PHP, C#, and to some extend 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.

Doxygen license

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.

Output Formats

The following output formats are directly supported by doxygen:

HTML

Generated if GENERATE_HTML is set to YES in the configuration file.

Generated if GENERATE_LATEX is set to YES in the configuration file.

Man pages

Generated if GENERATE_MAN is set to YES in the configuration file.

RTF

Generated if GENERATE_RTF is set to YES in the configuration file.

Note that the RTF output probably only looks nice with Microsoft’s Word 97. If you have success with other programs, please let me know.

XML

Generated if GENERATE_XML is set to YES in the configuration file.

Note that the XML output is still under development.

The following output formats are indirectly supported by doxygen:

Compiled HTML Help (a.k.a. Windows 98 help)

Generated by Microsoft’s HTML Help workshop from the HTML output if GENERATE_HTMLHELP is set to YES.
PostScript: Generated from the output by running make ps in the output directory. For the best results PDF_HYPERLINKS should be set to NO.
PDF: Generated from the output by running make pdf in the output directory. To improve the PDF output, you typically would want to enable the use of pdflatex by setting USE_PDFLATEX to YES in the configuration file. In order to get hyperlinks in the PDF file you also need to enable PDF_HYPERLINKS.