FORD 0.5

FORD, standing for FORtran Documenter, is an automatic documentation generator for modern Fortran programs.

This is an automatic documentation generator for modern Fortran programs. FORD stands for FORtran Documenter. As you may know, “to ford” refers to crossing a river (or other body of water). It does not, in this context, refer to any company or individual associated with cars.

Ford was written due to Doxygen’s poor handling of Fortran and the lack of comparable alternatives. ROBODoc can’t actually extract any information from the source code and just about any other automatic documentation software I found was either proprietary, didn’t work very well for Fortran, or was limited in terms of how it produced its output. f90doc is quite good and I managed to modify it so that it could handle most of Fortran 2003, but it produces rather ugly documentation, can’t provide as many links between different parts of the documentation as I’d like, and is written in Perl (which I’m not that familiar with and which lacks the sort of libraries found in Python for producing HTML content).

The goal of FORD is to be able to reliably produce documentation for modern Fortran software which is informative and nice to look at. The documentation should be easy to write and non-obtrusive within the code. While it will never be as feature-rich as Doxygen, hopefully FORD will be able to provide a good alternative for documenting Fortran projects.

Capabilities

Current features include:

• the ability to extract information about variables, procedures, procedure arguments, derived types, programs, and modules from the source code.

• the ability to extract documentation from comments in the source code.

• LaTeX support in documentation using MathJax.

• searchable documentation, using Tipue Search.

• author description and social media (including Github!) links.

• links to download the source code.

• links to individual files, both in their raw form or in HTML with syntax highlighting.

• use of Markdown to type-set documentation.

• links between related parts of the software.

• Bootstrap CSS for the documentation, making it both functional and pretty.

• configurable settings.

Installation

The simplest way to install FORD is using pip. This can be done with the command

sudo pip install ford

Pip will automatically handle all dependencies for you. If you do not have administrative rights on the computer where you want to produce documentation, pip will allow you to install FORD and its dependencies in a virtualenv located somewhere in your home directory.

Usage

See the documentation in the README on Github. A sample of FORD’s output can be found here.