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. 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:

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

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.

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):