Generating documentation like MSDN but manually

[NickThissen]

Hi,

Most of you probably know that there are tools (SandCastle I think?) that can generate an MSDN-like documentation (HTML files) from your source code by using the XML comments above members.

I am looking to generate a similar documentation (bunch of HTML files that one can link through), except not from XML comments but completely manually. It is for a custom scripting language, I have to document the available functions, and it would be great if I could do that in this common documentation style. Since there are no XML comments to generate the documentation from (the documentation is for the scripting language itself, not for my source code of the scripting language, I hope I made that clear), these automatic tools are probably largely useless for me.


What I'm looking for in detail is a way to generate these documentation files by simply supplying this information for each function:
- Namespace (just the name and maybe a description)
- Function name + description + return type
- List of arguments and their types

from this I would to generate a document where one can first view all the Namespaces, click one (they are supposed to be links) and view all the functions in that namespace. Then you can click on a function name and view its description and list of arguments for that function.
In other words: just like these automatic tools do, except now I want to supply this information manually.


Does anyone happen to know of any tool that can let me do this?

While writing this I thought of one way that I might be able to do it: just create namespaces and functions in actual VB code (corresponding to the scripting language functions) and generate the documentation from that, but
1) That seems a little contrived especially if a better tool is available,
2) I would be in trouble with the types of functions and arguments, since they would have to be .NET types and not the types that my scripting language supports.


Thanks!

[Jenova]

Have you come across Doxygen before? Would that help at all?

Regards,

Jenova

[NickThissen]

As far as I can see, no that wouldn't help at all, as that is just another tool that generates documentation from source code, which I don't have.

I ended up writing my own tool which produces the output I like. Nothing fancy visually, just plain old standard html pages with no styling whatsoever (except some headers and bold text), but it works for me.