This project grew out of the documentation needs of [Penlight](https://github.com/stevedonovan/Penlight) (and not always getting satisfaction with LuaDoc) and depends on Penlight itself.(This allowed me to _not_ write a lot of code.)
The [API documentation](http://stevedonovan.github.com/Penlight/api/index.html) of Penlight is an example of a project using plain LuaDoc markup processed using LDoc.
LDoc is intended to be compatible with [LuaDoc](http://luadoc.luaforge.net/manual.htm) and thus follows the pattern set by the various *Doc tools:
--- Summary ends with a period.
-- Some description, can be over several lines.
-- @param p1 first parameter
-- @param p2 second parameter
-- @return a string value
-- @see second_fun
function mod1.first_fun(p1,p2)
end
Tags such as `see` and `usage` are supported, and generally the names of functions and modules can be inferred from the code.
LDoc is designed to give better diagnostics: if a `@see` reference cannot be found, then the line number of the reference is given. LDoc knows about modules which do not use `module()` - this is important since this function has become deprecated in Lua 5.2. And you can avoid having to embed HTML in commments by using Markdown.
LDoc will also work with Lua C extension code, and provides some convenient shortcuts.
An example showing the support for named sections and 'classes' is the [Winapi documentation](http://stevedonovan.github.com/winapi/api.html); this is generated from [winapi.l.c](https://github.com/stevedonovan/winapi/blob/master/winapi.l.c).
This is straightforward; the only external dependency is [Penlight](https://github.com/stevedonovan/Penlight), which in turn needs [LuaFileSystem](http://keplerproject.github.com/luafilesystem/). These are already present in Lua for Windows, and Penlight is also available through LuaRocks as `luarocks install penlight`.
