C with Doxygen > XML > PDF
June 22, 2010 10:50 AM   Subscribe

Any experiences working with Doxygen XML output?

I'd like to develop a process to take XML output from Doxygen and produce PDFs. The goal is to document an API. I don't know much about XML yet.

The source material is C-language header files, marked-up with Doxygen tags. I need to be able to control formatting, document structure, and be able to add introductory text at the beginning of sections. The final output would be an 'API Reference Guide' in PDF format.

Do you have any tips or experiences? Thanks.
posted by Paquda to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
You don't have to go through XML, you can produce a latex file from doxygen and generate a PDF from this. See here.
posted by beerbajay at 11:16 AM on June 22, 2010


beerbajay has it, but in case you run into similar tasks in the future, you'll want to read up on XSL-FO.

XSLT can be daunting at first, especially if you're not comfortable with recursion -- it's a love it or hate it language. But it's really powerful and is the right tool for the job. There are GUI tools for this but I've never used them.
posted by ook at 11:25 AM on June 22, 2010


Response by poster: Thank you very much for your answers. I will look into the Latex output option. I might still need to go with XML output, though, because I need to be able to select particular groups of functions/structures/return codes for inclusion in the doc and need to be able to order them in specific ways. By 'group', I mean items defined together in one header file or grouped using Doxygen grouping tags. The XML output produces separate XML files for each group.
posted by Paquda at 3:06 PM on June 22, 2010


Response by poster: As a follow-up, I am getting good results by generating XML output with Doxygen, then applying CSS to format it. I've compiled a CSS style sheet defining formatting for each of the XML tags that Doxygen uses in its XML output. I'm using Prince, a CSS rendering engine, to apply my style sheet to the XML and produce a PDF file as output. So far so good.
posted by Paquda at 9:19 AM on August 20, 2010


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