PasDoc and FpDoc Comparison

Below I tried to summarize PasDoc and FpDoc differences. This is written by MichalisKamburelis, an author of PasDoc — but I tried to be as objective as I can. Feel welcome to edit and improve this page.

  • FpDoc keeps descriptions in separate XML files. PasDoc keeps descriptions inside comments in the source interface, or inside external files (one file for many descriptions, or one file with one description using @include).

  • Formatting in PasDoc is done using @tags (similar to javadoc and such), like @bold(This is bold text). Formatting in FpDoc is done using XML elements (similar to HTML), like <b>This is bold text</b>. Both projects support a lot of formatting options, you can compare the list of @tags on SupportedTags with the "Tag reference" on http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/fpdoc/fpdoc.html .

  • For a list of supported command-line options and formatting compare http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/fpdoc/fpdoc.html with CommandLine . Both projects support a lot of options, the differences are in details.

  • Some advanced features of PasDoc are listed on AdvancedFeatures . Most of them are not available in fpdoc as far as I know.

  • Both programs support many output formats including HTML and LaTeX.

    PasDoc has an output called htmlhelp, while fpdoc has chm output, although I didn’t compare them personally. PasDoc also has simplexml output, and latex2rtf output.

    You can see sample output of pasdoc e.g. here PasDocAutoDoc . Sample fpdoc output is the FPC reference.

  • PasDoc has a simple cross-platform GUI (in addition to the command-line of course).

  • FpDoc has http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPDoc_Editor .

  • PasDoc also has some useful tools like Pascal preprocessor and file_to_pascal_string .

  • On the other hand, fpdoc is written using fcl-passrc parser, that can be more easily used by other projects.