When comparing Doxygen vs PyDoctor, the Slant community recommends Doxygen for most people. In the question“What are the best Python documentation generators?” Doxygen is ranked 2nd while PyDoctor is ranked 3rd.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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...
Pro Created for improvement
Pydoctor was created to improve more from Epydoc. So it is even more better that Epydoc. For the purposes of the Twisted project as epydoc has difficulties with zope.interface. Puts a fair bit of effort into resolving imports and computing inheritance hierarchies and, as it aims at documenting Twisted, knows about zope.interface's declaration API and can present information about which classes implement which interface, and vice versa.
Pro Output can be pass to Sphinx
PyDoctor can pass object model to Sphinx to output style same as Sphinx. So from Pydoctor you could still pass the object model to Sphinx if you still prefer Sphinx look.
Pro Outstanding clean look
Pydoctor has more neat look compared to other documentation generator.
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.
Con Poor documentation and small size of community
Documentation is little and there isn't too much about Pydoctor references. Unlike Sphinx or any other documentation generators.
Con Works on Python 2 only
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