Source documentation

The FreeCAD source code is commented to allow automatic HTML documentation generation using Doxygen, a popular source code documentation system. Doxygen can document both the C++ and Python parts of FreeCAD.

The online source documentation is located at http://www.freecadweb.org/api/. Please note that this documentation is not always kept to date; if you have pressing questions about the code please ask in the developer section of the FreeCAD forum.

Build source documentation
If you have Doxygen installed, it's very easy to build the documentation. Follow the same steps you would do to compile FreeCAD, as described on the compile on Unix page; these steps are summarized here for convenience.
 * Get the source code of FreeCAD and place it in its own directory.
 * Create another directory in which you will compile FreeCAD and its documentation.
 * Configure the sources with, making sure you point to the source directory, and specify the required options for your build.
 * Trigger the creation of the documentation using.

While you are inside the build directory issue the following instruction to create only the documentation.

The resulting documentation files will appear in the directory

The point of entrance to the documentation is the file, which you can open with your web browser:

The DevDoc make target above will, if graphviz is installed on your system, generate a 2Gb+ volume of data. An alternative, smaller version (~500Mb), that is the version used on http://www.freecadweb.org/api/ can also be generated by issuing instead:

By nature, source doc is, and will ever be, work in progress. Don't hesitate to rebuild as often as needed. If you fall upon blatant inadequacies, feel free to post on the forum (note: It is really fully checked with cMake build process only).

As an alternative, the doc is generated from time to time and accessible on sourceforge here.

Here is another FreeCAD 0.19dev Doxygen documentation as well as a previous version 0.16dev_documentation, generate by qingfeng.xia.

Integrate Coin3D documentation
On unix systems, it is possible to link Coin3D source documentation with FreeCAD's. It allows easier navigation and complete inheritance diagrams for Coin derived classes.


 * On Debian and derived systems:
 * - Install the package libcoin60-doc
 * - Uncompress the file /usr/share/doc/libcoin60-doc/html/coin.tag.gz
 * - Regenerate source documentation
 * You are up for offline browsing.


 * If you don't want to or can't install Coin doc package, the links will be generated to access coin doc online at doc.coin3D.org, if doxygen tag file can be downloaded at configure time (wget).

How to integrate doxygen in to the FreeCAD source code
Example of a complete doxygen page: (from another project)

doxygen: http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkArrayCoordinates.html

source: https://github.com/Kitware/VTK/blob/master/Common/Core/vtkArrayCoordinates.h