Introduction
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.
Doxygen license
Copyright © 1997-2005 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.
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 :-)
- 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.
- Matthias Andree for providing a .spec script for building rpms from the sources.
- 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 internationalisation support. All language maintainers for providing translations into many languages.
- Gerald Steffens of E-trend for financial support.
- The band Porcupine Tree for providing hours of great music to listen to while coding.
- many, many others for suggestions, patches and bug reports.
