When comparing Sandcastle Help File Builder vs Doxygen, the Slant community recommends Doxygen for most people. In the question“What are the best documentation tools for .NET developers?” Doxygen is ranked 1st while Sandcastle Help File Builder is ranked 2nd.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Generates help from code
Generates help from xml comments in your .NET code.
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 MAML language is complex
If you want to customize the help, you need to use the Microsoft MAML language.
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.