Any ideas on what might be causing this and - more importantly - what can be done to fix it (or at least let it skip ahead and finish generating the documentation)?

Loading configuration file C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Flex SDK\frameworks\flex-config.xml [Fatal Error] toplevel.xml:8:11: Element type "gmail.com" must be followed by either attribute specifications, ">" or "/>". Error: Could not create toplevel.xml: Element type "gmail.com" must be followed by either attribute specifications, ">" or "/>".

Best I can figure, it's referring to my standard @author line that includes my email addy.

can you post the XML?

My guess is there is something else bad further up the xml doc.

I'm compiling pure AS3 - no MXML or anything. It does seem as though the error is thrown by content within comments, though. There is an undocumented setting for asdoc - lenient - that is supposed to tell the generator not to worry about poorly formatted HTML and to keep plowing ahead, but it does not seem to make a difference.

well you could try senocular's doc thing?

You mean his old web-based 2.0 app? That won't give me what I need - the standard, familiar set of documentation.

There are a couple of things that led me to this position. First was an error thrown when I used the Flex 3 compiler: Loading configuration file C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Flex SDK\frameworks\flex-config.xml G:\workspace\xxxx xxxx\src\com\greensock\plugins\EndVectorPlugin.as(65): col: 30 Error: Type was not found or was not a compile-time constant: Vector.

    public function init(start:Vector, end:Vector):void {

Flex 3, apparently, does not like Vector. Yes, asdoc does include the -exclude command, but this only prevents files from being output. They are still read, with the result that Vector fucks up my shit despite the fact that it is not used in my app.

So, per that blog post, I installed the Flex 4 SDK. The good news: I no longer get that error. The bad news is that I get a whole new set along the lines of: Loading configuration file C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Flex SDK\frameworks\flex-config.xml G:\workspace\AS3 Libraries\as3corelib\com\adobe\air\logging\FileTarget.as(53): col: 34 Error: The definition of base class LineFormattedTarget was not found.

public class FileTarget extends LineFormattedTarget

So throw in a few more hours of trial and error and I finally get it to the point where it's "simply" throwing errors indicating that it expects the comments within the classes to follow a particular format (I'm assuming HTML).

The thing that pisses me off is that I'm not even doing anything with Air or Flex. All I want is to generate the documentation for a pure AS3 app. I should not have had to jump through those hoops to get to this point, and I'm sure as hell not going to go back through and reformat the comments for my libraries AND those from third parties (e.g. greensock, as3corelib, etc.)

:pissed:

fwiw: Adobe's "Using the ASDoc tool"

While the docs indicate that you can set -strict via the command line, that appears to be horseshit. The only way to produce a result (as far as I can tell) is to set it within flex_config.xml. As for including -lenient, there is no noticeable difference - generation stops at the first occurrence of invalid formatting in the comments regardless of whether or not it is included.

Finally got what I needed. The solution involved the ExportProject plugin for FlashDevelop and an hour or two of trial and error. Wish I had more info on the steps it took, but it's all a blur.

Edit:

Here's what I've been able to work out so far: - gave up using Eclipse and went to FlashDevelop's ExportProject plugin. Interesting, considering that both use Asdoc.exe. :shrug: - set the plugin to use the Flex 3 rather than Flex 4. Also interesting given the whole Vector/File thing seen earlier. - set -static-link-runtime-shared-libraries=true via the plugin's UI - manually edited the Flex 3 flex-config file to set strict = false. (Doing so by passing an extra parameter through the plugin's UI had no effect.)

Not all of the above may be necessary, but there's no way in hell I'm going to go back through and figure it out.