Natural Docs

Natural Docs lets you document code written in any of 21 programming languages, plus it can be easily extended for more so whatever you use, it can too. And if your project uses multiple languages, no problem! It will all be included in the same set of documentation.

And Plain English Too

Natural Docs also speaks your other language... English! Its comments are designed to be very natural and readable so they're just as usable in the source code as they are in the generated documentation. No weird syntax or tags scattered everywhere.

Pretty, Powerful HTML

Natural Docs' generated documentation is pretty and powerful, with three independently scrolling panels, dynamic menus, search, and pop-up summaries when you hover over links. All its features work wherever you put it, be it a web server, a network share, or just opened from your hard drive.

So Let's Get Started!

If you're new to Natural Docs be sure to read our Getting Started guide and we'll have you up and running in no time. If you've been using Natural Docs 1.5, check out our tour of What's New in 2.0!

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Natural Docs 2.1.1 released

April 13th, 2021

Just uplifting some bug fixes from the development releases into the stable releases so you don't have to wait for 2.2.

SQL: Fixed a crash, something that could cause prototypes to not show up, and something that could cause prototypes to include too much of the code.
Images: Fixed a crash when working with embedded images.

That's it. If you don't use either of those you're safe skipping this one.

Discuss

Natural Docs 2.2 development release 3

April 13th, 2021

New development release. As I said last time I'm laying some groundwork for the future, so the new features probably won't be very exciting but they're important for Natural Docs going forward.

Language-Specific Keywords

So here's the issue: "Record" means one thing in C# and another thing in SQL. "Module" means one thing in SystemVerilog and another thing in Perl. So while there is still only one set of comment types in Comments.txt, you can now add keywords for them that only apply to certain languages. This probably doesn't mean much to you because if you're customizing Natural Docs for the languages you use it doesn't matter if you step on the ones you don't. However, it's good for Natural Docs itself because now these distinctions can be supported out of the box without any customizations.

Consequently, "Record" now only serves as a keyword for "Class" in C# to prevent unexpected behavior in other languages.

However, this also means all the database keywords can now be used without a prefix in SQL files. You can just use "Table" or "Field" instead of "Database Table" or "DB Field".

Language Modifiers

This is rather niche, but if you really want to you can use a language name as a modifier before a keyword. So you could document a JavaScript class from a C# file just by writing "JavaScript Class: MyClass". This is probably most useful when you're documenting things from a text file.

Bug Fixes and Tweaks

Fixed a bug that could prevent SQL prototypes from appearing.
Fixed a crash that could occur when embedding images.
Errors on the command line or in the configuration files no longer cause a full rebuild the next time Natural Docs is run. It will still do a full rebuild after a crash though, or if it detects changes to the configuration that require it.
I finally tested some old versions of Mono to see what the minimum version Natural Docs needs is. Apparently you need at least Mono 4.0 for it to run without crashing. That was released in 2015, but some Linux distributions have even older versions. Natural Docs will now tell you if you're on a version that's too old and it crashes.

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