❔ API Documentation Generator Tool for XML comments?
Can someone recommend a documentation generator tool that reads the source code of specific files and generates one html or pdf page based on the xml comments?
I tried docfx but the pdf generation seems broken, and the html one needs to be hosted on a server in order to use the search feature, but I need it to work locally.
23 Replies
ModularDoc
That is a tool I've developed
However it generates markdown documentation
As an alternative you can try Doxygen
GitHub
GitHub - hailstorm75/ModularDoc: Modular documentation generator fo...
Modular documentation generator for .NET libraries. Currently supporting Markdown only for GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket - GitHub - hailstorm75/ModularDoc: Modular documentation generator for .NET ...
You could also check out my thesis, there I have done an analysis of the available documentation tools https://github.com/hailstorm75/ModularDoc.Thesis/releases/tag/Release
I suppose you could join the generated markdown files into one and then convert that to a pdf
However, I believe that Doxygen is exactly what you are looking for
modular seems pretty impressive, props on that. there are a few things that i'm not super huge on (i'd love if it were basically 1:1 like the microsoft docs pages), but it's definitely an amazing feat
if i can write some CI that generates this stuff for my repo and puts the documentation into the repo's wiki, that'd be huge
ideally i would love the side bar to contain the namespaces (child namespaces being nested) and then the types being under those
Well the modularity part of the project pretty jank atm, I need to find time and fix it. However, the markdown generating part works pretty solid.
I suppose you are referring to GitHubs wiki sidebar?
yup
Yeah, that wiki is pretty bad. You need to upload each MD file separately
So it'd be nice if something could automate it
not necessarily
you can clone
https://github.com/hailstorm75/ModularDoc.wiki for exampleRly? I know that gitlab allows you to clone
a wiki is just its separate repo
just like gists
On GitHub?? Wow, how did I miss this
yup!
That is awesome, I'll update my readme then
so in the CI i would clone
*.wiki.git, purge all files, generate new pages, push, and doneAwesome! Hopefully I'll have time to fix up my project, there's a lot of work to be done there.
But the current state is useable
it'd be huge if it were able to generate documentation just from the source files, without the need for compiling
but i imagine that would make it way more difficult
you'd probably need to learn the entirety of the roslyn (#roslyn) api
which is like learning a whole new flavor of c#
I avoided doing it via source code to allow deployment in environments without Roslyn available
In addition, reflection is pretty neat, and it can do a lot
that doesn't seem related
neither of those
Even though, I do have issues linking types to the original source file
As far as I've understood, to access Roslyn features you need either some server or you'd need to write a vs extension
But I didn't research it too much tbh
nah the roslyn api is public i'm pretty sure
you need something like Microsoft.CodeAnalysis or whatever
Interesting
Well
ModularDoc is modular after all
So I can write a library for getting the necessary data directly from source code
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