The assembler is a tool to merge monodocer output into three files. Since monodocer produces tons of output files this is very unhandy to redistribute in addition the documentation can not be shown in monodoc by just clicking it's icon you have to type monodoc mydocs-folder into your console. assembler can be found in your monodoc directory which is /usr/lib/monodoc/ in most cases, or it can be invoked by the mdassembler command.

Usage

Note: This example assumes you already have a documentation generated from monodcer in the mydocs-folder

mdassembler --ecma mydocs-folder -o mydocs-lib

This command will create a mydocs-lib.tree and mydocs-lib.zip file in your mydocs-folder. Where mydocs-folder is the folder containing your monodocer output and mydocs-lib is the name of your library, which can be chosen at will.

After that a .sources file must be created with the same name as the .tree and .zip files. The .sources file is a simple text file containing the following code of xml:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
 <monodoc>
  <source provider="ecma" basefile="mydocs-lib" path="mydocs-lib"/>
 </monodoc>

The provider attribute tells the browser which kind of documentation is showing. When editing library documentation it should always be ecma (writing other types of documentation, like man pages, tutorial, etc. means changing that provider attribute).

The basefile attribute tells the browser where to find that documentation; it is the name of your .zip and .tree files.

The path attribute is a tag that lets the browser group the different documentation sources in sections (showed in the tree view). If we make two different set of documentations (from two different libraries we have written) they could be grouped together as long as we use the same path. This is, for example, the way used to group the GtkSourceView and Gtk-Sharp documentation together. You can look for more examples in the sources directory of monodoc.

Note: Monodoc supports multiple <source>-elements in case you want more than one .tree and .zip file appear under the same node in your monodoc browser.

The next step is to move the generated documentation files (sources, zip and tree) to the sources directory of monodoc. That directory can be found with one of the following commands:

pkg-config monodoc --variable=sourcesdir
monodoc --get-sourcesdir #(deprecated) 
 

Finally, you have to tell Monodoc that your documentation exists adding a new line to the monodoc.xml file (inside the root node). In our example:

<node label="My Library Documentation" name="mydocs-lib"/>

You can start Monodoc and a new item named My Library Documentation will be shown. You can now navigate or edit it.