Preface

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    <title>Preface</title>

    <para>ROBODoc is an API documentation tool for C, C++, Java, Assembler,
        Basic, Fortran, LaTeX, Postscript, Tcl/Tk, LISP, Forth, Perl, Shell
        Scripts, Makefiles, Occam, COBOL, DCL, Visual Basic, HTML, DB/C, XML,
        and many other languages.  It can be made to work with any language that
        supports comments.</para>

    <para>ROBODoc works by extracting specially formatted headers from your
        source code and writes these to documentation files. These files can be
        formatted in HTML, ASCII, XML DocBook, or RTF; and indirectly to
        PDF and HTML Help.</para>

    <para>ROBODoc is similar to JavaDoc, though the idea is much
        older than JavaDoc.  ROBODoc allows you to maintain a program and
        its documentation in a single file.  This makes it easier to keep
        your documentation up-to-date.</para>

    <para>ROBODoc can be used to document anything you like,
        functions, methods, variables, definitions, test cases, makefile
        entries, and anything else you can think of.</para>

    <para>It can create documentation consisting of many small files.
        For instance in HTML format for easy browsing and publication on
        the web.  It can also create a single file in LaTeX or RTF format
        for inclusion into bigger design documents.  The RTF format is
        suited to be included in Word documents.</para>

    <para>ROBODoc allows you to separate internal documentation from
        external documentation.  In singledoc mode it can create a section
        layout based on the hierarchy of your modules.</para>

    <para>ROBODoc is designed to work with a lot of different
        programming languages.  It has no knowledge of the syntax of
        programming languages.  It only has some knowledge about how
        comments start and end in a lot of programming languages.  This
        means that you sometimes have to do a little more work compared to
        other tools that have detailed knowledge of the syntax of a
        particular language.  They can use that knowledge to figure out
        some of the information automatically.  This usually also means
        that they work only with one or two languages.  </para>

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