Doxygen (/ˈdɒksidʒən/ DOK-see-jən)[3] is a documentation generator[4][5][6][7] that works with many programming languages.

It provides cross-referencing that a reader can use to refer back to the source code from the generated documentation.

It supports many languages including C,[8] C++, C#, D, Fortran, IDL, Java, Objective-C,[9] Perl,[10] PHP,[11] Python,[12][13] and VHDL.

It is free software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).

Like other documentation generators such as Javadoc, Doxygen extracts information from both the comment and the symbolic (non-comment) code.

Doxygen supports output in many formats including: HTML, CHM, RTF, PDF, LaTeX, PostScript and man page.

A common way is to left-align asterisks on each line which Doxygen does not include in the output.