1 <!-- $Id: preface.xml,v 1.4 2007/05/11 08:16:44 thuffir Exp $ -->
5 <para>ROBODoc is an API documentation tool for C, C++, Java, Assembler,
6 Basic, Fortran, LaTeX, Postscript, Tcl/Tk, LISP, Forth, Perl, Shell
7 Scripts, Makefiles, Occam, COBOL, DCL, Visual Basic, HTML, DB/C, XML,
8 and many other languages. It can be made to work with any language that
9 supports comments.</para>
11 <para>ROBODoc works by extracting specially formatted headers from your
12 source code and writes these to documentation files. These files can be
13 formatted in HTML, ASCII, XML DocBook, or RTF; and indirectly to
14 PDF and HTML Help.</para>
16 <para>ROBODoc is similar to JavaDoc, though the idea is much
17 older than JavaDoc. ROBODoc allows you to maintain a program and
18 its documentation in a single file. This makes it easier to keep
19 your documentation up-to-date.</para>
21 <para>ROBODoc can be used to document anything you like,
22 functions, methods, variables, definitions, test cases, makefile
23 entries, and anything else you can think of.</para>
25 <para>It can create documentation consisting of many small files.
26 For instance in HTML format for easy browsing and publication on
27 the web. It can also create a single file in LaTeX or RTF format
28 for inclusion into bigger design documents. The RTF format is
29 suited to be included in Word documents.</para>
31 <para>ROBODoc allows you to separate internal documentation from
32 external documentation. In singledoc mode it can create a section
33 layout based on the hierarchy of your modules.</para>
35 <para>ROBODoc is designed to work with a lot of different
36 programming languages. It has no knowledge of the syntax of
37 programming languages. It only has some knowledge about how
38 comments start and end in a lot of programming languages. This
39 means that you sometimes have to do a little more work compared to
40 other tools that have detailed knowledge of the syntax of a
41 particular language. They can use that knowledge to figure out
42 some of the information automatically. This usually also means
43 that they work only with one or two languages. </para>