Documentation

Building documentation from your source code has widely been used for a long time, and now commonly used tools like Doxygen work with Fortran.

A number of automated documentation generation projects for Fortran have come and gone over the years, and below are documented a number of them. At the top of the list are the recommended and still supported documentation tools.

Candidate Tools

Tool Description Known issues
Recommended
Doxygen Commonly used documentation tool for large repositories. Officially supports Fortran with language-specific docblocks. See doxygen/index.md for details on use.
  • Examples are somewhat outdated
  • Support traditionally has not been great
FORD Created due to Doxygen's lack of Fortran compatability, FORtran Documentater (FORD) is an independent automatic documenter for modern Fortran. See ford/index.md for details on use.
  • Not the healthiest repository
  • Not as feature rich as Doxygen (in principle)
Dead projects
ROBODoc Automatic parsing of any comment-enabled language into various output formats
  • Last updated 2021
  • Various links no longer work
  • Cannot actually extract information correctly from Fortran
Doctran Cross-platform documentation generator specifically designed for Fortran
  • Last updated 9 years ago
  • Homepage examples et al no longer exist
f90tohtml Last revision 2009
f90doc The basis for FORD Last revision 2005