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It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

Who's using Natural Docs?

Natural Docs is an open-source, extensible, multi-language documentation generator. You document your code in a natural syntax that reads like plain English. Natural Docs then scans your code and builds high-quality HTML documentation from it.

Source: Natural Docs

Having started using Natural Docs at work to maintain documentation on parts of a project implemented in ActionScript, JavaScript, Perl, XML, XSLT, and possibly PHP--it seems like a very cool system with an extremely simple and natural syntax applicable to a wide array of source code formats.

Is anyone else out there using this package? If you were and stopped, how come? Just curious...

Archived Comments

  • Thanks for the heads up on Natural Docs, I have been using phpDocumentor but this seems to be a great way to document projects that use a variety of languages (HTML, PHP, Javascript for example).

  • It looks like a great solution for multiple languages, but I don't see that it also supports JavaDoc. JavaDoc has many benefits, and I would rather see Natural Docs either support JavaDoc comments, or somehow be able to include rendered JavaDoc output (or use another doclet to generate a compatible intermediary).

  • Brian: Well, as I understand it, Natural Docs is a replacement for something like JavaDoc. (or POD, or pydoc, or etc) It's trying for a more wiki-like or YAML-like syntax.

    That's definitely a downside to Natural Docs, though, if we were using Java in our project. We use Perl, but the ND syntax seems to complement POD a bit more than it replaces it.

  • It actually does support JavaDoc, it just hasn't been released yet. You have to pull from CVS. For example, see here.