After having some experience with documentation generation from
dmd command like, and seeing outputs, I wasn't satisfied with it.
Other alternatives as Doxygen is available, though it parses
codes itself that is not based on what version of DMD is
installed on system.

Since the structure of DDoc is already defined, instead of
generating HTML output, I would propose to generate an XML file
that contains meta data about codes and comments which can be
used by 3rd party documentation generator programmes to generate
HTML files. This way DDoc definitions can be simplified, better
looking documents can be generated much easily.

Tolga Cakiroglu:

> After having some experience with documentation generation from
> dmd command like, and seeing outputs, I wasn't satisfied with it.

What problems have you found in that output?

Bye,
bearophile

On Saturday, 17 May 2014 at 18:03:53 UTC, Tolga Cakiroglu wrote:
> After having some experience with documentation generation from
> dmd command like, and seeing outputs, I wasn't satisfied with it.
> Other alternatives as Doxygen is available, though it parses
> codes itself that is not based on what version of DMD is
> installed on system.
>
> Since the structure of DDoc is already defined, instead of
> generating HTML output, I would propose to generate an XML file
> that contains meta data about codes and comments which can be
> used by 3rd party documentation generator programmes to generate
> HTML files. This way DDoc definitions can be simplified, better
> looking documents can be generated much easily.

Try compiling with the -X flag to generate a JSON file describing
the source. Add the -D flag if you want documentation comments in
the JSON output.

Hope that helps!

Am 17.05.2014 20:28, schrieb Mason McGill:
> On Saturday, 17 May 2014 at 18:03:53 UTC, Tolga Cakiroglu wrote:
>> After having some experience with documentation generation from
>> dmd command like, and seeing outputs, I wasn't satisfied with it.
>> Other alternatives as Doxygen is available, though it parses
>> codes itself that is not based on what version of DMD is
>> installed on system.
>>
>> Since the structure of DDoc is already defined, instead of
>> generating HTML output, I would propose to generate an XML file
>> that contains meta data about codes and comments which can be
>> used by 3rd party documentation generator programmes to generate
>> HTML files. This way DDoc definitions can be simplified, better
>> looking documents can be generated much easily.
>
> Try compiling with the -X flag to generate a JSON file describing
> the source. Add the -D flag if you want documentation comments in
> the JSON output.
>
> Hope that helps!

Also see https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/ddox for DDOC compatible documentation generator that uses the JSON output. However, due to various shortcomings, of which not all are easy to resolve, I'm planning to instead directly use a D parser at some point.

>
> Also see https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/ddox for DDOC compatible documentation generator that uses the JSON output. However, due to various shortcomings, of which not all are easy to resolve, I'm planning to instead directly use a D parser at some point.

Yes, this seems like a good tool. Actually, the reason o my thought was to take as much meta data from codes as possible to generate much more useful information. Not for documentation only, and analysis as well. This would remove the burden of defining and updating document generator on DMD, and move it to external tools.