Wysywig literate programming (or viewing generated documentation on-the-fly)

Question

I use a lot of illustrations, diagrams and equations to document C++ and python codes, and a way to do this is to inline them with doxygen. The problem is that, when coding, they are not directly available in the code (unless I use ascii-art for this purpose).

Is there an automatic, quick and fast way to, while coding, view the generated documentation? E.g., I could have a separate Eclipse tab with the rendered documented code (HTML), while coding in another tab... and the documentation rendering tab would be updating automatically as I change the code and the documentation.

Is this possible? Is there a tool, plug-in for Eclipse or add-on for Visual Studio enabling this?

Answer 1

Frankly, I use a second monitor (or second computer) to view such documentation just to keep them out of the way - I want to see them alongside my Visual Studio screen not taking up space that could be occupied by code.

I publish the generated Doxygen documentation to an internal web server so if you have an HTML viewer plugin you could just point it to that. (I usually have a browser open alongside).

You could setup your Doxygen project to be generating directly into the web server directory so there's no copying time to get it renewed.

One tip, if you have a large code base and Doxygen takes an annoyingly long time is to have a special setup file just pointing at the code you're working on, to quickly regenerate the relevant couple of pages. You could have a python script observing the directory and re-running Doxygen if files change.