+

+Requires very little overhead from the writer of the documentation. Plain text will do, Markdown is support, and for more fancy or structured output HTML tags and/or some of doxygen's special commands can be used.
+Cross platform: works on Windows and many Unix flavors (including Linux and MacOSX).
+Indexes, organizes and generates browsable and cross-referenced output even from undocumented code.
+Generates structured XML output for parsed sources, which can be used by external tools.
+Supports C/C++, Java, (Corba and Microsoft) Java, Python, VHDL, PHP IDL, C#, Fortran, TCL, Objective-C 2.0, and to some extent D sources.
+Supports documentation of files, namespaces, packages, classes, structs, unions, templates, variables, functions, typedefs, enums and defines.
+JavaDoc (1.1), qdoc3 (partially), and ECMA-334 (C# spec.) compatible.
+Comes with a GUI frontend (Doxywizard) to ease editing the options and run doxygen. The GUI is available on Windows, Linux, and MacOSX.
+Automatically generates class and collaboration diagrams in HTML (as clickable image maps) and $\mbox{\LaTeX}$ (as Encapsulated PostScript images).
+Uses the dot tool of the Graphviz tool kit to generate include dependency graphs, collaboration diagrams, call graphs, directory structure graphs, and graphical class hierarchy graphs.
+Allows grouping of entities in modules and creating a hierarchy of modules.
+Flexible comment placement: Allows you to put documentation in the header file (before the declaration of an entity), source file (before the definition of an entity) or in a separate file.
+Generates a list of all members of a class (including any inherited members) along with their protection level.
+Outputs documentation in on-line format (XHTML and UNIX man page) and off-line format ( $\mbox{\LaTeX}$ and RTF) simultaneously (any of these can be disabled if desired). All formats are optimized for ease of reading.
+ Furthermore, compressed HTML can be generated from HTML output using Microsoft's HTML Help Workshop (Windows only) and PDF can be generated from the $\mbox{\LaTeX}$ output.
+Support for various third party help formats including HTML Help, docsets, Qt-Help, and eclipse help.
+Includes a full C preprocessor to allow proper parsing of conditional code fragments and to allow expansion of all or part of macros definitions.
+Automatically detects public, protected and private sections, as well as the Qt specific signal and slots sections. Extraction of private class members is optional.
+Automatically generates references to documented classes, files, namespaces and members. Documentation of global functions, global variables, typedefs, defines and enumerations is also supported.
+References to base/super classes and inherited/overridden members are generated automatically.
+Includes a fast, rank based search engine to search for strings or words in the class and member documentation (PHP based).
+Includes an Javascript based live search feature to search for symbols as you type (for small to medium sized projects).
+You can type normal HTML tags in your documentation. Doxygen will convert them to their equivalent $\mbox{\LaTeX}$ , RTF, and man-page counterparts automatically.
+Allows references to documentation generated for other (doxygen documented) projects (or another part of the same project) in a location independent way.
+Allows inclusion of source code examples that are automatically cross-referenced with the documentation.
+Inclusion of undocumented classes is also supported, allowing to quickly learn the structure and interfaces of a (large) piece of code without looking into the implementation details.
+Allows automatic cross-referencing of (documented) entities with their definition in the source code.
+All source code fragments are syntax highlighted for ease of reading.
+Allows inclusion of function/member/class definitions in the documentation.
+All options are read from an easy to edit and (optionally) annotated configuration file.
+Documentation and search engine can be transferred to another location or machine without regenerating the documentation.
+Supports many different character encodings and uses UTF-8 internally and for the generated output.
+Doxygen can generate a layout which you can use and edit to change the layout of each page.
+There more than a 100 configurable options to fine-tune the output.
+Can cope with large projects easily.

+

Although doxygen can now be used in any project written in a language that is supported by doxygen, initially it was specifically designed to be used for projects that make use of Qt Software's Qt toolkit. I have tried to make doxygen `Qt-compatible'. That is: Doxygen can read the documentation contained in the Qt source code and create a class browser that looks quite similar to the one that is generated by Qt Software. Doxygen understands the C++ extensions used by Qt such as signals and slots and many of the markup commands used in the Qt sources.

+

Doxygen can also automatically generate links to existing documentation that was generated with doxygen or with Qt's non-public class browser generator. For a Qt based project this means that whenever you refer to members or classes belonging to the Qt toolkit, a link will be generated to the Qt documentation. This is done independent of where this documentation is located!

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