Questions tagged [documentation-generation]

A documentation generator is a programming tool that generates documentation intended for programmers (API documentation) or end users (End-user Guide), or both, from a set of specially commented source code files, and in some cases, binary files.

A documentation generator is a programming tool that generates documentation intended for programmers (API documentation) or end users (End-user Guide), or both, from a set of specially commented source code files, and in some cases, binary files.

Document generation can be divided in several type of documents:

  • Batch documents (all automated documents)
  • Interactive documents (documents that can not be produced automatically)
  • Text block correspondence (documents created based on pre-defined text blocks)
  • Forms (forms for websites)

You can place every type of document you come across in one of these categories. A lot of software solutions are offered on the Internet that can automate these processes. In particular, some integrated development environments provide interactive access to documentation, code metadata, etc.

See more information about language support for generation programs at Comparison of documentation generators.

832 questions
44
votes
2 answers

Is Sphinx already suitable for C++ documentation?

I want to try out documentation generators for a new project in C++. I think my options are either Doxygen or Sphinx. Since I have projects in Python for which I'd like to use Sphinx, I wonder whether Sphinx is the right choice for C++ as well. The…
clstaudt
  • 21,436
  • 45
  • 156
  • 239
43
votes
3 answers

Has anyone used Sphinx to document a C++ project?

Sphinx is a new documentation tool for Python. It looks very nice. What I'm wondering is: How suitable this is for documenting a C++ project? Are there any tools for converting existing documentation (e.g. doxygen) to Sphinx format? Are there…
Nick
  • 27,566
  • 12
  • 60
  • 72
40
votes
5 answers

C++: Where to write the code documentation: in .cpp or in .hpp files?

Where is it customary to write the in-code documentation of classes and methods? Do you write such doc-blocks above the corresponding class/method in the header (.hpp) file, or within the source (.cpp) file? Is there a widely respected…
augustin
  • 14,373
  • 13
  • 66
  • 79
39
votes
4 answers

how to generate api documentation

I need to write some api documentation for a REST API that I've created. Are there tools that will stub out a nice html output similar in style to the underscore api documentation? Or perhaps something that will output something as a twitter…
37
votes
5 answers

jQuery compatible JavaScript documentation generator

I need to choose a documentation generator (similar to jdoc in java or rdoc in ruby) for my javascript project that (built with jquery, underscore and backbone) Candidates: jsdoc toolkit pdoc natural docs docco YUI doc doctool…
clyfe
  • 23,695
  • 8
  • 85
  • 109
34
votes
2 answers

What are docstrings called in java?

Before Java methods we have something like: /** * Takes a number and returns its square root. * @param x The value to square. * @return The square root of the given number. */ public float getSqrt(float x) { ... } Does this have a name (like…
tttppp
  • 7,723
  • 8
  • 32
  • 38
34
votes
7 answers

How do I get a multipage site from GitHub Pages' automatic generator?

I am using the 'Automatic Generator' of GitHub Pages, and I see it only generates a single index.html and other web resources. How it works if I want to have a multi-page website generated from other markdown files?
32
votes
5 answers

How to add documentation for my functions in Netbeans PHP?

I tried the following, /* * addRelationship * * Adds a relationship between two entities using the given relation type. * * @param fromKey the original entity * @param toKey the referring entity * @param relationTypeDesc the type of…
Raj
  • 22,346
  • 14
  • 99
  • 142
32
votes
1 answer

What are the main differences of Sphinx and Doxygen?

I want to prepare a documentation for a collection of projects, modules and libraries in the field of computer vision (mostly written in c++). To this end I had a look on OpenCV documentation and as you may know OpenCV 2.4.x documentation is based…
Ali Mirzaei
  • 1,496
  • 2
  • 16
  • 27
32
votes
4 answers

Creating html doc from postman collection

I've developed a pretty extense API, and I have it on Postman, which works pretty nice. Now I have to generate an html doc to keep it versioned inside /docs along with my sources. Is there a tool or a way to achieve this? I really don't want to…
danielrvt
  • 10,177
  • 20
  • 80
  • 121
31
votes
3 answers

What is the relationship between docutils and Sphinx?

There seems to be a plethora of documentation tools for Python. Another one that I've run across is epydoc. It seems like Sphinx is the de facto standard, because it's used to generate the official Python docs. Can someone please sort out the…
allyourcode
  • 21,871
  • 18
  • 78
  • 106
30
votes
2 answers

How to serve documentation using godoc together with go modules?

It seems that the godoc tool is not Go modules aware. A simple godoc -goroot=. serves the project files, but it does not generate documentation for the packages. I tested it from withing the projects source directory, where also the go.mod and…
Simon Schürg
  • 2,134
  • 2
  • 20
  • 31
30
votes
5 answers

Is there a way to generate Javascript API documentation like the Google Closure Library API Documentation?

I'm trying to find a tool that generates HTML documentation for my Javascript source code. Does anyone know if the tool that Google uses to generate the interface at the following URLs is open source? Would I be able to generate similar output?…
28
votes
8 answers

How to generate Microsoft Word documents using Sphinx

Sphinx supports a few output formats: Multiple HTML files (with html or dirhtml) Latex which is useful for creating .pdf or .ps text How can I obtain output in a Microsoft Word file instead? With another doc generator I managed to generate a…
Andrea Francia
  • 9,737
  • 16
  • 56
  • 70
28
votes
1 answer

How to generate documentation for React Native?

I tested Doxygen and multiple GitHub projects (jsdoc, react-docgen, react-doc-generator using npm i -g like: react-doc-generator ./ -o DOCUMENTATION.md react-docgen --pretty -o out/reactdocgen.html ./ jsdoc ./src doxywizard But none really…
1
2
3
55 56