News Archive

Natural Docs 1.33 released

January 22nd, 2005

Well here’s another release I didn’t plan on doing... :)

So apparently there’s no standard, open source documentation system available for Flash ActionScript 2.0. That prompted Aral Balkan to start a campaign to get it full support in Natural Docs. After 67 e-mailed votes within the first 24 hours, many more since then, and $310 in donations, here we are: Natural Docs 1.33 has full language support for ActionScript.

The rest of you don’t leave empty handed, though. We continue our fight against long prototypes screwing up the page layout. Default values now wrap, but more importantly, if the prototype is still too long it automatically switches to a more condensed layout that gives each parameter its own line. Here’s the real example that prompted this, and what it looks like now:

function fun_tbf_createUeReconfigurationInfo(
	in	Struct_accessUeRef	p_ueRef,
	in	UeRrcConnectionState	p_targetUeRrcConnectionState,
	in	RabState	p_targetUeRabState,
	inout	integer	p_activationTime
) return Struct_tbf_ueReconfigurationInfo

You can now specify the HTML charset with -cs, which is very important for non-English documentation that needs to use something like Shift_JIS. It also allows people to view Mac-specific characters on Windows properly and vice versa. The default leaves it unspecified, like it is currently.

(c), (r), and (tm) now get translated into ©, ®, and ™ everywhere, instead of just (c) in the footer.

Fixed problems with star line comments when the first line had content but only one star, such as:

/* Function: Name
 * Description
 */

Fixed a bug where a class wouldn’t get a link in the Everything index if it had a constructor by the same name.

Natural Docs won’t die if it can’t write to the main Topics.txt or Languages.txt anymore, which caused problems when installing it to shared volumes that the user doesn’t have write access to.

Long prototypes and text diagrams that scroll won’t have the last line partially obscured in Mozilla-based browsers anymore.

Documenting Perl with POD now uses =begin nd instead of =pod begin nd, which was invalid POD syntax. It will still be supported for compatibility, but you shouldn’t use it anymore and thus it will be relegated to an undocumented feature.

That’s it. Nothing incredible. That waits for 1.4.

- Greg