The Base plugin comes with a number of basic extensions and features that are likely to be needed by any output format and some plugins in general.
Including, but not limited to:
- Markdown and KDoc parsing.
- Kotlin signature generation.
- Transformers that suppress empty modules/packages, unwanted visibility modifiers, obvious functions (hashCode/equals/etc), and so on.
- Declaration link resolution (i.e linking to a class in a KDoc).
- Support for external documentation links (i.e links to Java's Javadocs website or Kotlin's stdlib).
- Declaration source link generation for navigation to source code (a.k.a
sourcebutton). - Multiplatform support.
- Output file writers.
The Base plugin is not intended to be used directly by those who want to generate documentation - it is a building block for other plugins and formats.
It is in the heart of all documentation formats that come with Dokka.