Intermediate Doc Format

[Hannes Wallnoefer]

Hi Ethan,

JavaDoc does support different output formats through the Doclet interface.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/24/docs/api/jdk.javadoc/jdk/javadoc/doclet/package-summary.html#package-description
https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/24/docs/api/jdk.javadoc/jdk/javadoc/doclet/Doclet.html

So what you describe should be possible to do with JavaDoc.

Hannes


On 20.08.2025, at 15:20, Ethan McCue <ethan at mccue.dev> wrote:

Apologies in advance for the shallowness of thought.

Javadoc takes as input sources and produces as output html. When you get the docs for your JDK it comes with a nice index page documenting all the modules within.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/24/docs/api/index.html

When you make docs for a library, however, it starts to get a lot more split up.

Is it at all feasible for javadoc to not produce html as its output but to instead produce a serialized representation of the doc-info extracted from sources? So instead of running javadoc on all the sources in the jdk and then in libraries you could have jmods

java.base.jmod/
  classes/
    ...
  ...
  docs/
    java.base.docinfo.json
other.library/
  ...
  docs/
    other.library.docinfo.json

And as part of a linkage step produce one mega page with all the javadoc info from all the libraries you are using.

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