JavaDoc Editor for eclipse

by Max Rohde,

Formatting JavaDoc using plain HTML can be a troublesome and time-intensive experience. Today I installed the JDocEditor plugin for eclipse, which allows editing JavaDoc in eclipse using a small rich text editor.

Here, a quick evaluation, a few screenshots and a little getting started guide.

Evaluation

Good:

  • Free
  • Helps to reduce the hassle of dealing with line breaks and paragraphs in JavaDoc
  • Allows to compose lists and do simple formatting like using bold and italics

Not so good:

  • The editor has no native support for JavaDoc annotations such as @link, …
  • The editors handling of line breaks, paragraphs and basically any more sophisticated formatting can be unpredictable at times

Conclusion:

  • Good tool to enhance productivity in editing JavaDoc documentation with simple formatting.

Screenshots

The Editor:

Generated JavaDoc (rendered):

Generated JavaDoc (html):

Getting Started

  • Install using the update site http://www.certiv.net/updates
  • After the plug in has been installed, add the view of the plugin to your workspace as shown below

  • The view can be found under the category JavaDoc Editors/ JDocEditor

Resources

StackOverflow Discussion "JavaDoc editor for Eclipse to create formatted text"

Blog post on JDocEditor from 2005

Categories: java