“declare class” vs “export class”

[SmartFoxServer]

First of all let me state that I'm new to .d.ts generation, so I could be making wrong assumptions. In such case, please help me better understand the topic.

I need to generate the d.ts file for a UMD library I developed and bundled with Webpack.
JSDoc + tsd-jsdoc does the job, but when I test the output file in Visual Studio Code, IntelliSense is not working at all.

I compared the output file with a d.ts file generated by the tool dts-gen, which works fine in VSC (but it is not useful for my needs because it doesn't recognize the types and doesn't include the JSDoc documentation).

dts-gen declares the classes contained in my library like this: export class SmartFox
Instead tsd-jsdoc output contains the following: declare class SmartFox

If I search-and-replace all "declare class" with "export class" and re-test in VSC, everything works as expected, as you can see in the attached pictures:

Can you help understand what am I doing wrong?

Additionally, as you can see in the pictures, the html tags contained in my jsdoc (i.e. <p> or <caption>) are not stripped. Does that depends on tsd-jsdoc or Visual Studio Code itself?

Thank you for your help.

[englercj]

You're not doing anything wrong, we just always use declare currently for top-level declarations. You can see more details in #64. I'm open to PRs.

[SmartFoxServer]

Thanks.
Any ideas about the html tags issue?

[englercj]

We output the jsdoc comment exactly as it is given to us from jsdoc. If you have html tags in there, they will exist in the output.