HeaderDoc

Infobox Software
name = HeaderDoc



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developer = Apple Inc.
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genre = Documentation generator
license = Apple Public Source License
website = http://developer.apple.com/opensource/tools/headerdoc.html

HeaderDoc is documentation generator developed and maintained by Apple Inc. Using specially commented source code files as input, HeaderDoc generates documentation for the code in HTML or XML format. Syntax for HeaderDoc comment tags is largely similar to, and as of HeaderDoc version 8, supportive of Javadoc tags. Apple's HeaderDoc project is free, open source software distributed under the Apple Public Source License.

Supported plain text languages

*Bash
*Bourne Shell
*C Shell
*C
*C++
*Korn Shell
*Java
*Javascript
*Mach MIG definitions [http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/boundaries/chapter_14_section_4.html]
*Objective-C
*Pascal
*Perl
*PHP

The HeaderDoc tool set consists of the main utility, headerdoc2html, and gatherheaderdoc. The headerdoc2html tool generates a directory of either HTML (or optionally XML) files from the commented source files specified. Afterwards, the gatherheaderdoc utility may be executed to create a table of contents file for the documentation. Finally, the resolveLinks utility may be used to resolve cross-references between multiple documentation collections.

Apple's Xcode development environment contains features designed to assist the process of creating documentation using the HeaderDoc syntax and tools.

The HeaderDoc suite also includes tools for generating manual pages from a simple XML dialect that resembles HTML, and provides a bridging tool that helps generate manual pages from header comments for functions via XML.

See also

* Comparison of documentation generators
* Standard interface documentation

External links

* [http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/headerdoc/ HeaderDoc Project Page]
* [http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/HeaderDoc/index.html Documentation for HeaderDoc syntax and utilities]
* [http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/ Latest version] (currently 8.6)