The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of documentation generators. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. Unless otherwise specified in footnotes, comparisons are based on the stable versions without any add-ons, extensions or external programs.
Contents
General information
Basic general information about the generators, including: creator or company, license, and price.
Operating system support
The operating systems the generators can run on.
Note (4): GNU D Compiler.
Language support
The programming languages the generators recognize.
Note (1): .NET is not a programming language, but is listed here for convenience.
Note (2): Though not supported as a native input language, Doxygen can be extended through the use of filters. Examples include Visual Basic, VB.NET, Perl, and Pascal.
Note (3): Generators listed here can be extended to support any language that has comments.
Note (12): Doxygen has limited native support for Python. It can be extended through the use of the doxypypy input filter.
Input formats
The input formats the generators can read.
Output formats
The output formats the generators can write.
Note (4): Ddoc has a macro system which can be customized to output any desired format. CHM, groff (manpages), XHTML, XML, and LaTeX (so PostScript and PDF) were tested. They are not currently included in the standard distribution. Standard HTML output also is generated using macros and can be redefined.
Note (5): Though not officially supported as an output format, Epydoc uses LaTeX and PostScript as intermediate steps to produce the final PDF documentation.
Note (6): Via Doclets from Third Parties.
Note (7): DOC++ outputs LaTeX and includes templates to enable conversion to PDF or PostScript with the appropriate latex tools. Required tools however are not included with DOC++.
Note (8): HyperSQL can output UnitTests (which can be embedded with the JavaDoc like description) as XML
Note (9): RDoc currently only provides generators for CHM and XML documents in the RDoc version provided as part of the Ruby 1.9 Core.
Note (10): RDoc generates documentation for RI, which is Ruby's version of the Unix man pages.
Note (11): Requires Microsoft HTML Help Workshop.
Note (12): Only produces ePub 2.0 and generated ePubs usually fail a validation check.