Code documentation outside code file

Question

For some reasons, i want to document an API but I don't want to write the documentation directly inside the source code as it is now widely done. I'm looking for a documentation generator tool which could take as input a documentation file and be able do fetch function prototype from source code and check the consistency with the documentation. Do you know any tool that could do that ?

Answer 1

Doxygen can document code also when documentation text is outside it source. Just create a souce file whose text is a comment, containing the headers:

For example, if you have

SOURCE.H

void func();

you can add

SOURCE.DOX

/**
   \function void func()
   Your usual doxygen text here.
*/

And generate the documentation making doxygen to accept both .h and .dox files.