FPDoc Editor

Introduction

LazDoc is an integrated editor/viewer for Lazarus. Items described on this and using LazDoc itself requires you to be familiar with FPDoc. For more information see: Free Pascal documentation tool manual

Where to find LazDoc??

Because LazDoc is still in development, and it's not clear whether it will become part of Lazarus itself or it will be available as a separate package / library, LazDoc is only available when Lazarus is compiled with -dEnableLazDoc set.

 make OPT="-dEnableLazDoc" clean all

If you are used to compiling Lazarus from Lazarus, don't forget to set the option in the "Build Lazarus" dialog.

Usage

Using LazDoc is very simple.

1. Open the LazDoc editor. You can find it under the menu View.

2. Set the search path for LazDoc in the Environment | Environment options dialog, under the LazDoc tabpage.

3. Open or select a file for which documentation exists.

4. Place and move the cursor. After placing the cursor on the source editor, you will notice that the caption of the LazDoc form changes. The caption shows the source element selected and the filename of the documentation file. By selecting the appropriate page in LazDoc you can edit a specific documentation tag. Ofcourse it is also possible to use LazDoc only as a viewer.

Future plans

The todo list currently contains the following items, in no particular order:

• Add a HTML viewer
• Make it work on project files also
• Make it work for fpc sources (rtl files already exist)
• Make LazDoc create new elements in documentation
• Propose to expand documentation tags with: "todo" and "notes"
• Add settings to environment menu
• Add all documentation tags to LazDoc
• Add more source elements to be interpreted by LazDoc using exisiting code tools (now procedure/function/constructor/destructor)
• Reduce overhead even further
• Use IPC for communication