Doxygen

Doxygen is the standard tool for generating documentation from annotated C++ sources. You can download it from its downloads page.

  • It can generate an on-line documentation browser (in HTML) and/or an off-line reference manual (in LaTeX) from a set of documented source files. There is also support for generating output in RTF (MS-Word), PostScript, hyperlinked PDF, compressed HTML, and Unix man pages. The documentation is extracted directly from the sources, which makes it much easier to keep the documentation consistent with the source code.
  • You can configure doxygen to extract the code structure from undocumented source files. This is very useful to quickly find your way in large source distributions. Doxygen can also visualize the relations between the various elements by means of include dependency graphs, inheritance diagrams, and collaboration diagrams, which are all generated automatically.

Create a Doxyfile template

~$ cd /blocks/[USER]/[BLOCK]
~/blocks/[USER]/[BLOCK]$ mkdir docs
~/blocks/[USER]/[BLOCK]$ cd docs
~/blocks/[USER]/[BLOCK]/docs$ doxygen -g

Edit your Doxyfile

The minimal info that you need to change in your Doxyfile is the following tags:

PROJECT_NAME           = "My Project"

OUTPUT_DIRECTORY       = .

INPUT                  = ../

FILE_PATTERNS          = *.c \
                         *.cc \
                         *.cxx \
                         *.cpp \
                         *.c++ \
                         *.h \
                         *.hh \
                         *.hxx \
                         *.hpp \
                         *.h++ \

Generate the Documentation

~/docs$ doxygen Doxyfile

#Open the /docs/html/index.html with your web browser.

All the info of the previous examples have been written taking as reference a docs folder inside your block.

However, you can create your Doxyfile where you want changing the INPUT tag in your Doxyfile.

For example, to generate the docs folder in you project, you need to specify: INPUT = ../blocks/[USER]/[BLOCK_NAME]/.

Read more info about doxygen in the official documentation.

If you want to make your own main page, you can create a DoxygenMainpage.h in the docs folder with the following sections:

/**
@mainpage  TITLE_OF_YOUR_HOME_PAGE

@author YOUR_USER_NAME and all the info about the author

Description of you block

@section TITLE

Section info
*/

A good example is libfreenect/doc/DoxygenMainpage.h:

../../_images/doxygen.png 
/**
    @mainpage  libfreenect
    @author The OpenKinect Community - http://www.github.com/openkinect

    Cross-platform driver for the Microsoft Kinect Camera

    Website: http://www.openkinect.org

    @section libfreenectIntro Introduction

    libfreenect is an open source, cross platform development library for
    the Microsoft Kinect camera. It provides basic functionality to
    connect to the camera, set configuration values, retrieve (and in some
    cases decompress) images, and provides functionalty for the LED and
    Motor.

    @section libfreenectDesignOverview Design Overview

    libfreenect provides access to devices via two structs:

    - A context, which manages aspects of thread safety when using
      multiple devices on multiple threads.
    - A device, which talks to the hardware and manages transfers and configuration.

    Either or both of these structs are passed to the functions in order
    to interact with the hardware. The USB access is handled by
    libusb-1.0, which should work in a mostly non-blocking fashion across
    all platforms (see function documentation for specifics).

    @section libfreenectShouldIUseIt Should You Use libfreenect?

    The main design goal of libfreenect is to provide a simple, usable
    reference implementation of the Kinect USB protocol for access via
    non-Xbox hardware. With this in mind, the library does not contain any
    algorithms relevant to computer vision usages of the camera.

    If you are looking for machine vision algorithms, we recommend the
    OpenCV library, available at

    http://www.opencv.org

    If you are looking to use the kinect in a larger framework that may
    involve other depth sensors, we recommend the OpenNI framework,
    available at

    http://www.openni.org

    Note that libfreenect can be used as a hardware node in OpenNI.

*/