Miscellaneous

As discussed earlier, there is a variety of processors available in the Synopsis distribution. There are a number of parsers (for IDL, Python, and C++, a C parser is in development), some formatters (HTML is probably the most popular one, but others such as ASCII, Texinfo, Docbook, or Dot may be useful, too), and a number of linker processors.

To find out about the available options of each of them, use the --help option. For example

synopsis -f Dot --help

will tell us how to use the Dot formatter. To pass these options to the Dot formatter, simply append them via the -Wf option, and they will be forwarded.

If we want to generate a (UML) class diagram, we could for example run

synopsis -f Dot -Wf,--title="class diagram" -Wf,--format=ps \
          -Wf,hide_operations=False,hide_attributes=False \
          -o Paths.ps Paths.syn

But passing options via the command line has its limits, both, in terms of usability, as well as for the robustness of the interface (all data have to be passed as strings !). Therefor, for any tasks demanding more flexibility a scripting interface is provided, which will be discussed in the next chapter.