The tools described in this report are intended to help you create simple man-page-style documentation quickly and easily. Specifically, the program doctext takes C programs and generates nroff (Unix man page format), LaTeX [(ref Lamport86)], or HTML files. All of the information is embedded in structured comments, allowing the documentation to be maintained along with the code. The design of the special markup language commands emphasizes readability of the original source code (the structured comment). This approach differs from approaches such as web [(ref web)], where special processing must be applied to produce a readable version of the source code. Such approaches can do much more than doctext but are really aimed at documenting the source code of a program rather than the use of the program. Further, because those approaches are so intrusive, users tend to avoid them. The approach in doctext provides an effective comprimise between usability and functionality.
The doctext approach has been independently adopted by Java; the javadoc program provides HTML documentation from Java source. doctext predates Java and provides more formats (LaTeX and nroff as well as HTML) and formatting commands.