I got destracted, and – as several times before – started a search for UML tools. This time, I came across PlantUML and liked it. I also found pegdown-doclet that allows you to use PlantUML in your javadoc and provides support for using Markdown. Why did I never think of this before? What a great idea!

I immediately got some ideas about extending the support for PlantUML. But I didn’t like that the doclet mixes the Markdown feature with the PlantUML support. And pegdown is deprecated, so I didn’t want to build on it. So I decided to restructure the doclet. The Markdown support is now provided by MDoclet, based on flexmark-java and without any dependency on PlantUML. The PlantUML support is provided by the plantuml-taglet which can be used independently, i.e. with the standard doclet as well as with MDoclet.

This took longer than expected, so the new PlantUML features will have to wait a bit, but I now have a good starting point.