LDoc - A Lua Documentation Tool

Copyright (C) 2011-2012 Steve Donovan.

Rationale

This project grew out of the documentation needs of
Penlight (and not always getting satisfaction
with LuaDoc) and depends on Penlight itself. (This allowed me to not write a lot of code.)

The API documentation of Penlight
is an example of a project using plain LuaDoc markup processed using LDoc.

LDoc is intended to be compatible with LuaDoc and
thus follows the pattern set by the various *Doc tools:

--- Summary ends with a period.
-- Some description, can be over several lines.
-- @param p1 first parameter
-- @param p2 second parameter
-- @return a string value
-- @see second_fun
function mod1.first_fun(p1,p2)
end

Tags such as see and usage are supported, and generally the names of functions and
modules can be inferred from the code.

LDoc is designed to give better diagnostics: if a @see reference cannot be found, then the
line number of the reference is given. LDoc knows about modules which do not use module()

• this is important since this function has become deprecated in Lua 5.2. And you can avoid
  having to embed HTML in commments by using Markdown.

LDoc will also work with Lua C extension code, and provides some convenient shortcuts.

An example showing the support for named sections and 'classes' is the Winapi
documentation; this is generated from
winapi.l.c.

Installation

This is straightforward; the only external dependency is
Penlight, which in turn needs
LuaFileSystem. These are already present
in Lua for Windows, and Penlight is also available through LuaRocks as luarocks install penlight.

Unpack the sources somewhere and make an alias to ldoc.lua on your path. That is, either
an executable script called 'ldoc' like so:

lua /path/to/ldoc/ldoc.lua $*

Or a batch file called 'ldoc.bat':

@echo off
lua \path\to\ldoc\ldoc.lua %*