Source documentation

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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 the FreeCAD API website. 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 is very easy to build the documentation. Also install Graphviz to be able to produce diagrams showing the relationships between different classes and libraries in the code.

sudo apt install doxygen graphviz

Then follow the same steps you would do to compile FreeCAD, as described on the compile on Unix page, and summarized here for convenience.

  • Get the source code of FreeCAD and place it in its own directory freecad-source.
  • Create another directory freecad-build in which you will compile FreeCAD and its documentation.
  • Configure the sources with cmake, making sure you indicate the source directory, and specify the required options for your build.
  • Trigger the creation of the documentation using make.
git clone https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD.git freecad-source
mkdir freecad-build
cd freecad-build
cmake -DBUILD_QT5=ON -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3 ../freecad-source

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

make -j$(nproc --ignore=2) DevDoc

As mentioned in compiling (speeding up), the -j option helps shorten compilation time. The resulting documentation files will appear in the directory

freecad-build/doc/SourceDocu/html/

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

xdg-open freecad-build/doc/SourceDocu/html/index.html

The DevDoc target will generate a significant amount of data, around 5 GB of new files, particularly due to the diagrams created by Graphviz.

An alternative, smaller version of the documentation which takes only around 500 MB can be generated with a different target. This is the version displayed on the FreeCAD API website.

make -j$(nproc --ignore=2) WebDoc

Other versions

FreeCAD 0.12 documentation hosted in Sourceforge.

FreeCAD 0.16 development documentation built by qingfeng.xia.

FreeCAD 0.19 development documentation built by qingfeng.xia.

Integrate Coin3D documentation

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

  • Install the libcoin-doc, libcoin80-doc, or similarly named package.
  • Unpack the archive coin.tar.gz located in /usr/share/doc/libcoin-doc/html; the files may be already unpacked in your system.
  • Generate again the source documentation.

If you don't install the documentation package for Coin, the links will be generated to access the online documentation at BitBucket. This will happen if a Doxygen tag file can be downloaded at configure time with wget.

How to integrate doxygen in to the FreeCAD source code

This is a Work In Progress. See Doxygen

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

Extra python modules
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