What underlying technology does MATLAB use for its documentation system?

Matlab is well known for having excellent documentation, for example

• http://uk.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/vertcat.html

Matlab documentation details release functionality with code examples, images and mathematical figures. Importantly the matlab documentation is a mixture of inline code comments and general discussion, seamlessly merged.

One example of a well known documentation system is Sphinx

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_(documentation_generator)
• For example this toolbox documentation is written using Sphinx: http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/index.html

Another example of a documentation system is confluence,

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confluence_(software)
• For example http://www.cmegroup.com/confluence/display/EPICSANDBOX/CME+Globex

My question is what is the technology Matlab uses to produce its documentation? Is it 100% HTML in-house (ie proprietary) or is it based on some other technology?

Can anyone recommend any documentation systems?

Answer 1

[Soumya Saxena]

I understand that you want to know about the underlying technologies used by Matlab Documentation.

The underlying technology uses HTML. If you have created a custom toolbox that works with MathWorks products, you can create HTML files to provide documentation. These files would enable you to insert diagrams, screen shots, figures and equations, in order to make your toolbox more usable.

In addition, you should create a “info.xml” file to enable MathWorks to find and identify your documentation and a “helptoc.xml file” to create a “table of contents” for all topics in your custom toolbox. The detailed description of the process is given at the following link:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/display-custom-documentation.html

If you want to know about the detailed infrastructure used by the documentation, I would recommend that you contact the MathWorks Technical Support at the following link:

http://www.mathworks.com/support/contact_us/

[Matlab2010]

Thank you for your reply.

But what is the "underlying technology"? Is it 100% in-house? Does it use any public libraries? Is it a white-labelled third-party solution?