A documentation generator is a
programming tool that generates
software documentation intended for programmers (
API documentation) or end users (
end-user
In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product, such as sysops, system administrato ...
guide), or both, from a set of
source code
In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...
files, and in some cases,
binary file
A binary file is a computer file that is not a text file. The term "binary file" is often used as a term meaning "non-text file". Many binary file formats contain parts that can be interpreted as text; for example, some computer document fil ...
s. Some generators, such as
Javadoc, can use special
comments to drive the generation.
Doxygen
Doxygen ( ) is a documentation generator and static analysis tool for software source trees. When used as a documentation generator, Doxygen extracts information from specially-formatted comments within the code. When used for analysis, Doxyge ...
is an example of a generator that can use all of these methods.
Types of generation
Document generation can be divided in several types:
* Batch generation (generic technique)
* Text block correspondence (documents created based on pre-defined text blocks)
* Forms (forms for websites)
* Documentation synthesis:
** Documentation can be inferred from code
** Documentation can be inferred from execution traces
** Documentation can be inferred from mailing lists
Some
integrated development environment
An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools ...
s provide interactive access to documentation, code metadata, etc.
References
See also
*
Comparison of documentation generators
*
Template processor
A template processor (also known as a template engine or template parser) is software designed to combine templates with a data model to produce result documents.
The language that the templates are written in is known as a template language ...
*
Static code analysis
*
Literate programming
Literate programming is a programming paradigm introduced in 1984 by Donald Knuth in which a computer program is given as an explanation of its logic in a natural language, such as English, interspersed (embedded) with snippets of macros an ...
*
Integrated development environment
An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools ...
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