Product Overview of Natural Docs
Natural Docs is a comprehensive documentation system designed to help developers and programmers efficiently document their source code. Here’s a detailed look at what Natural Docs does and its key features.
What Natural Docs Does
Natural Docs is a tool that generates high-quality documentation from comments and annotations within your source code. It supports a wide range of programming languages and does not require knowledge of the specific structure of programs, modules, libraries, classes, or functions. Instead, it relies on simple syntactic hints and manual annotations to document code elements.
Key Features and Functionality
Documentation Syntax and Compatibility
Natural Docs uses a straightforward syntax for documenting code. It supports Javadoc-like comments, making it easy to migrate existing documentation. The system recognizes various keywords such as Function, Class, Variable, and their synonyms, allowing flexible documentation of different code elements.
Automatic Summaries and Grouping
Natural Docs automatically generates summaries for every file, class, and section. These summaries use the first sentence of the topic as the description and can be enhanced by manually adding group topics to organize long lists and improve navigation.
Detailed Output
The generated documentation is presented in a three-panel design:
- Left Panel: A dynamic menu to browse the project organized by class or source file.
- Middle Panel: A summary of the selected class or file, allowing quick navigation to specific functions or variables.
- Right Panel: Detailed information about the selected code element, including prototypes, parameters, return values, and descriptions. All elements are clickable links, and hovering over them provides pop-up summaries.
Customization and Output Options
Natural Docs allows for extensive customization:
- Output Configuration: You can specify output folders, titles, subtitles, copyrights, and timestamps. The documentation can be generated in HTML format, which is fully functional without any additional software.
- Custom Styles: The CSS structure is documented, enabling users to create custom styles and use their own images to personalize the look of the generated documentation.
Search and Accessibility
The generated HTML documentation includes a search box that quickly locates classes, functions, and other elements. The search results are color-coded and include bolded classes for easy identification. The documentation is self-contained, meaning it can be hosted on a website, accessed locally, or shared via network or zip file without requiring any additional software.
Encoding and Source File Handling
Natural Docs supports various character encodings, including Unicode and specific encodings for different file extensions. It can scan source files from specified folders and handle relative or absolute paths, ensuring portability across different computers and version control systems.
In summary, Natural Docs is a powerful and flexible tool for generating and managing documentation for source code. Its ease of use, automatic summary generation, customizable output, and robust search functionality make it an invaluable asset for developers seeking to maintain well-documented codebases.