Overview

The machinery directive stipulates that documentation must be supplied with every machine, and the product safety act also requires operating instructions for products sold. Due to these legal requirements, the documentation of machines and products is necessary for every company today. The documentation costs time, must be consistent and should always look the same, even if several people are working on it.

TwinCAT Documentation Generation enables the creation of documentation within a machine application or PLC library. To do this, the program uses specific markups within the source code comments to highlight relevant information and format it for documentation. Reference to other documents containing additional information is also possible.

Since the documentation is generated directly from the programming, it can be ensured that the application program and the documentation are consistent. Moreover, the additional effort for developers is moderate because the documentation generation is based on markups. Developers can contribute content to the documentation in TwinCAT Documentation Generation without being familiar with the typical authoring tools.