Doxygen Review

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Review of Doxygen powered by the Slant community.

Doxygen is the de facto standard tool for generating documentation from annotated C++ and other languages like C#, Java, Python, PHP etc.
It is used by other tools like Code Graph.
Also see article Generate UML with Doxygen.

SpecsUpdate

PlatformsWindows, Linux, Mac OSX

LicenseGPL v2

Output FormatHTML, RTF (MS-Word), PostScript, hyperlinked PDF, compressed HTML, and Unix man pages

Python version compatibility2 and 3

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Pros

Pro
Free

Pro
Generates documentation from comments

Doxygen can generate documentation from formatted comments in the source code. This is extremely useful when writing detailed man pages.

Pro
Cross-platform

Doxygen is compatible with multiple languages. Including but not limited to: C, Objective-C, C#, C++, Java, Python, PHP etc...

Cons

Con
i18n support is poor

Cannot work properly with non-ascii paths on Windows

Con
PDF output is very problematic

Doxygen PDF output relies on the now broken LaTeX tabu package which was abandoned over a decade ago by its developer.

Con
No recursive inclusion

For example, if you specify INCLUDE_PATH=incl, it doesn't search other folders included in the incl folder (incl/sub1 or incl/sub2) and there's no option to turn on recursive inclusion.