Hi, I'm trying to understand why none of the Dokka...

# dokka

[David Hamilton]

Hi, I'm trying to understand why none of the Dokka / KDocs / Kotlin core documentation works with the popular Dash/Zeal/Velocity offline readers?
I've separately raised the lack of support for KDocs with the author of Dash, but there seem to be two additional problems:
• Most Kotlin 3rd-party libraries seem to generate documentation that Dash cannot download
• Even the core Kotlin library documentation cannot be downloaded for offline reading.
(To answer the question of why this is desirable, the answers are: Working while travelling, speed/convenience of item lookup, and fuzzy search that facilitates speedy searching of multiple resources)

[Ignat Beresnev]

Hi! Indeed, at the moment and out of the box Kotlin / Dokka don't produce any output or format that can be imported into other tools 😞

I believe the documentation for Java code is usually imported from javadoc.jar, which contains HTML files, so I assume the tools just parse the HTML files themselves. I'd like to avoid it as much as possible for Kotlin, as maintaining backward compatibility of the generated HTML layout and tags seems like hell.

At the moment I only see one good solution: for Dokka to start generating some machine-readable output format specifically for integration with tools. For instance, it could dump all documentation as a JSON/XML file, which could then be imported into Deal/Zeal/Velocity.

There's actually an issue for that, albeit with a different primary use case: #2787. Denis has already added your use case to it, but feel free add additional comments and details if you want to 🙂

It's actually possible to implement such a format as a 3rd party Dokka plugin, and I know that some members of this channel have developed their own JSON/XML Dokka output formats already, but I don't know if any of them are public or even stable enough to use as a short to mid-term solution. I'd be happy to collaborate if someone wants to implement such a format that will be public, updated and relatively stable