#Doxygen documentation how to#
#Doxygen documentation install#

Pick your preferred way of installing Sphinx from the official instructions. There are binaries for Windows, Linux (compiled on Ubuntu 16.04), and MacOS, alongside source which you can build yourself.

#Doxygen documentation install#

Grab it from the official download page and install it. We can use Doxygen to do this job for us. Sphinx doesnвЂ™t have the ability to extract API documentation from C++ headers this needs to be supplied either by hand or from some external tool. If youвЂ™re convinced that this is a good avenue to explore, then we can begin by installing dependencies.

In Sphinx however, the finer-grained control gives you the ability to write documentation which is truly geared towards getting people to learn and understand your library. ItвЂ™s essentially paraphrasing the header files, to take a phrase from Robert Ramey embedding things like rationale, examples, notes, or swapping out auto-generated output for hand-written is not very well supported. On a more fundamental level, DoxygenвЂ™s style of documentation is listing out all the API entities along with their associated comments in a more digestible, searchable manner. The docs generated by Sphinx also look a lot more modern and minimal when compared to Doxygen and itвЂ™s much easier to swap in a different theme, customize the amount of information which is displayed, and modify the layout of the pages. There are some great comparisons of reStructuredText and Markdown by Victor Zverovich and Eli Bendersky if youвЂ™d like some more information. One can add their own вЂњrolesвЂќ and вЂњdirectivesвЂќ to the markup to make domain-specific customizations. Sphinx instead uses reStructuredText, which has those important concepts which are missing from Markdown as core ideals. Although they added Markdown support in 2012, Markdown is simply not the best tool for writing technical documentation since it sacrifices extensibility, featureset size, and semantic markup for simplicity. There are also limitations to its markup. Docs generated with Doxygen tend to be visually noisy, have a style out of the early nineties, and struggle to clearly represent complex template-based APIs. Why Sphinx?Дoxygen has been around for a couple of decades and is a stable, feature-rich tool for generating documentation. WeвЂ™ll also integrate this process into a CMake build system so that we have a unified workflow.ДЇor an example of a real-world project whose documentation is built like this, see fmtlib.

#Doxygen documentation how to#

This post will show you how to use Sphinx to generate attractive, functional documentation for C++ libraries, supplied with information from Doxygen. Tools canвЂ™t solve this problem in themselves, but they can ease the pain.