Automatic generation of HTML documentation from Modelica packages

[Francesco Casella]

The Modelica language has been designed to make the automatic generation of library documentation from the source code, by exploiting type information (attributes), comments, graphical annotations and documentation annotations.

Dymola is able to generate pretty-printed HTML documentation, and this feature has been used, e.g., to generate the documentation of the Modelica Standard Library. However, Dymola is not free software. For organizations who want to rely on OMC for the entire Modelica toolchain, this feature would be extremely important, possibly with improvement over what is currently done by Dymola.

An additional useful feature would be to automatically generate LaTeX and/or Open Document Format code, that can, e.g., be included as an appendix to a technical report, containing the full, hyperlinked documentation of the library itself.

[Martin Sjölund]

You cannot really generate LaTeX or ODF from html (which is what Modelica documentation is based on).
The only thing missing from the OpenModelica toolchain to generate better documentation than ​https://build.openmodelica.org/Documentation/ is an API to create svg from graphical annotations. OMEdit might be able to do it, but would not really be scriptable...

[Martin Sjölund]

We now do generate (some) icons in the documentation. Is this good enough?

[Francesco Casella]

I think being able to generate HTML would be already good enough. In fact,
I have checked ​https://build.openmodelica.org/Documentation/ which is in general quite good.

A small issue I found in the ​ThermoPower documentation is that the " HTML tag in the documentation string is interpreted literally and not as a quotation mark.

I understand this documentation was obtained by running ​https://build.openmodelica.org/Documentation/GenerateDoc.mos, which is kind of documented in the ​OpenModelica forum.

I would suggest to add a short section to the ​User's Guide that explains how to use this script with a litte bit more detail.

@adeas31, could you take care of that?