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
Cross-platform

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

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.

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.