The Xdoc plugin is the primary mechanism used to produce the Maven-generated documentation as well as any user supplied "xdocs". An xdoc is an XML document conforming to a small and simple set of tags. Maven uses this format extensively. All Maven-generated reports are first generated as an xdoc, which is then transformed to HTML via this plugin.

The documentation is mainly in Anakia format. More information along with samples, can be found at:

• the tags defined
• examples of the tags

There are a few additions to the anakia format, highlighted in the subsequent sections.

In addition to xdocs, users may wish to include other types of files such as images, their own HTML files, PDFs, etc. By default, this plugin will copy all files located in the maven.docs.src directory (xdocs by default) to the final generated site.

If you create a style/project.css stylesheet under maven.docs.src, it will be copied to the resulting document tree and imported into each page (via @import). This allows you to easily add and modify the styles that are provided by Maven.

You can use the footer tag for including text or images just below the navigation menu and above the copyright notice. This tag is only usefull in the navigation.xml file and should be placed within the body element. For example:

You can put a navigation bar on bottom of each page by including a <navbar/> element in an xdoc's body. This element takes three optional attributes, prev, home and next, as shown in the following example:

If a search element is found in the navigation.xml body, a search navigation menu is generated that uses google

If you need to include the contents of another XML document in your document, you can use the <escapeXml> tag, as demonstrated below. For instance, the code:

Would produce the following output (click here to see the content of escapeXml.xml):

To open a link in a new window, use the "target" attribute. For example, for a menu item: ]]> XDoc automatically adds the "Opens in a new window" icon and "New Window" tooltip to links with the "target" attribute.

XDoc automatically adds the "External Link" icon and tooltip to links referring to external sites (actually, any absolute url).

From version 1.10 on, the xdoc plugin allows for an optional id tag in the section and subsection elements: