NATURALDOCS(1)

💖 NATURALDOCS 💖

okay bestie, so this is the manual page for naturaldocs from the General Commands Manual section — like, the classic man 1 vibe, but make it cute. she's a documentation generator and she's iconic. let's go 🫶

---

✨ NAME ✨

NaturalDocs — an extensible, multi-language documentation generator 🦋

---

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

naturaldocs -i <input (source) directory> [-i <input (source) directory>
...] -o <output format> <output directory> [-o <output format> <output
directory> ...] -p <project directory> [options]

---

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so this manual page gives you the briefly version of the .B naturaldocs command (yes that .B is just sitting there in the original, we love a legacy artifact 💀). real talk though, heads up on one thing:

not me having two names 😭 — naturaldocs is actually a wrapper script that, on Debian, invokes the real NaturalDocs perl program. so the real, original name of the program is NaturalDocs, but on Debian systems you invoke it as naturaldocs. same girl, different outfit 💅

Natural Docs is is an open-source, extensible, multi-language documentation generator. (the "is is" is canon, bestie, I don't make the rules 🙈)

here's the slay: you document your code in a natural syntax that reads like plain English. Natural Docs then scans your code and builds high-quality HTML documentation from it. no cap. it's giving effortless. periodt. 🔥

---

✨ OPTIONS ✨

a summary of options, extracted from the help printed by the -h switch, is included below, bestie. for a complete description of how NaturalDocs works, go read the text files in the /usr/share/doc/naturaldocs directory. iykyk 📚

Required parameters 💅

these ones? mandatory. you literally cannot skip them. sorry babes.

• -i, --input, --source DIR — specifies an input (source) directory. Required. can be specified multiple times. 🎀
• -o, --output FMT DIR — specifies an output format and directory. Required. can be specified multiple times, but only once per directory. possible output formats are HTML and FramedHTML. ✨
• -p, --project DIR — specifies the project directory. Required. there needs to be a unique project directory for every source directory. one-to-one, no sharing, that's the rule 🌸

Optional parameters 🦋

• -s, --style STYLE [STYLE ...] — specifies the CSS style when building HTML output. if multiple styles are specified, they will all be included in the order given. order matters, bestie 👑
• -img, --image DIR — specifies an image directory. can be specified multiple times. start with * to specify a relative directory, as in -img */images. 🎀
• -do, --documented-only — specifies only documented code aspects should be included in the output. if you didn't document it, she's not showing it 💅
• -t, --tab-length LEN — specifies the number of spaces tabs should be expanded to. this only needs to be set if you use tabs in example code and text diagrams. defaults to 4. ⭐
• -xi, --exclude-input, --exclude-source — excludes an input (source) directory from the documentation. automatically done for the project and output directories. can be specified multiple times. 🚫
• -nag, --no-auto-group — turns off auto-grouping completely. (the flag is literally called nag, iconic naming, no notes 💀)
• -oft, --only-file-titles — source files will only use the file name as the title. short, sweet, minimal 🎀
• -r, --rebuild — rebuilds all output and data files from scratch. does not affect the menu file. 🧚
• -ro, --rebuild-output — rebuilds all output files from scratch. 🌈
• -q, --quiet — suppresses all non-error output. she's silent but she's still working 💜
• -?, -h, --help — displays syntax reference. your lil cheat sheet 📖

---

✨ AUTHOR ✨

NaturalDocs was written by Greg Valure <gregvalure@naturaldocs.org>. 💖

this manual page was written by Federico Di Gregorio <fog@debian.org>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others). 🫶

---

and that's the whole page bestie, you ate that 🎀✨

cute lil sign-off: this was the General Commands Manual flavor of NATURALDOCS(1), dated May 2007 — vintage but still slaying 💅🦋