Xdoc is a project to rewrite the implementation of the LaTeX doc package (in a broader sense) to make its features more general and flexible. For example, where doc only provides commands for documenting macros and environments, xdoc also provides commands for similarly documenting package options and switches. This is furthermore done in such a way that it is very easy to add more such commands for documenting things, such as e.g., templates (an important concept in the future LaTeX3) and program components for other languages (functions, classes, procedures, etc.). A side effect is that many minor bugs in doc are fixed.

The design aims to take advantage of many still experimental features of future versions of LaTeX, but since these are neither reasonably stable nor widely available, the configuration interfaces and package author commands of xdoc are likely to change. To still provide a stable interface for other packages to build upon, the actual package names include a "major version number" of sorts. The drop-in replacement package for standard doc is xdoc2; it requires nothing outside standard LaTeX2e.

The docindex/docidx2e package changes the index and list of changes typesetting so that none of the formatting has to be controlled via the index style file. The docindex package provides control of formatting via templates (nice interface, but requires several experimental packages), whereas the docidx2e package has traditional raw macro interfaces and works with standard LaTeX2e.

The author is Lars Hellström.