Documentation generator for Objective-C?

Question

Is there a generally accepted documentation generator for Objective-C (similar to RDoc for Ruby)? I saw Doxygen and ObjcDoc, and I wonder what is most widely used.

Answer 1

Doxygen is probably the most widely used option. Since this is not only for ObjC (doxygen supports many other languages), development is active and the community is quite strong. HeaderDoc (currently an open source project), compared to it, apparently stagnated. HeaderDoc only produces HTML output, while doxygen also produces PDF, LaTeX and many other forms of output besides HTML. Even Apple seems to recommend doxygen with this guide to automatically create documentation sets compatible with the Xcode help viewer during the Xcode build process.

It is worth noting that doxygen can read HeaderDoc style comments, so you can write your documentation in HeaderDoc style and decide later whether to produce the final output using doxygen or HeaderDoc.

Answer 2

Check out the appledoc . It is based on Doxygen . You can see that he eats his dog food by creating the appledoc reference documentation for the appledoc source code . Compare, for example, GBComment.h with GBComment Link to a class .

• appledoc: how to write comments
• Examples of using command line options

Also, check out the Xcode Documentation Configuration Guide for detailed instructions on how to create documentation that works with Xcode. These are instructions that appliedoc automates.

Answer 3

Doxygen is very widely used. I seem to use it as an SO response about once a week.

Answer 4

Realm's new Jazzy tool that generates documentation in the new Xcode 6 style and supports the creation of Swift documentation (just like Objective-C).

Answer 5

Like doxygen, the apple has a tool that comes with development tools. It generates the type of documentation you see on things like the SystenConfiguration structure. The tool is called HeaderDoc, the documentation can be found in the HeaderDoc User Guide .

Answer 6

Maybe you should try jazzy Realm . This is an open source project. jazzy supports both Objective-C and Swift.

"The result matches the appearance of the official apple reference documentation after WWDC 2014." What can you judge by the sample document that it provides.