Features

• Validating XML editor. Supports DTD, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG, Schematron schemas.
  • Schema-directed editing. This makes creating invalid documents almost impossible.
  • Automatically switches to lenient mode to make it easy fixing an invalid element. Automatically switches back to its strict, validating, normal editing mode, once the element is fixed.
  • Can be used to edit XML documents not constrained by a grammar. In such case, XMLmind XML Editor (XXE) is still very nice to use because it simulates a very loose, dynamically created/dynamically updated, DTD.
  • Supports XML catalogs.
• Ready-to-use support for the following document types:
  • XHTML. Fully supports HTML.4 tables and forms.
  • DocBook v4 (DTD). Fully supports CALS and HTML.4 tables (this means: proper rendering and easy editing using specialized table editing commands).
  • DocBook v5 (RELAX NG schema).
  • DITA. Fully supports CALS tables and simpletables.
  • MathML 2 Presentation Markup [A]. Comes with a Math tool which makes it easy adding equations to your XML documents without having to learn MathML.
  • Simplified DocBook [A]. DocBook Slides [A].
• The word processor-like view is parametrized using a substantial subset of CSS2.
  • Also has a fully editable tree view.
  • Multiple, synchronized, views can be used to edit the same document, for example: a tree view showing XML nodes, a word processor-like view and another styled view only showing section titles.
  • Supports the @media print standard CSS construct.
  • Proprietary extensions to CSS allow styled blocks and tables to be collapsed/expanded.
  • Proprietary extensions to CSS allow controls such as buttons, check boxes, combo boxes, text fields, etc, to be embedded in the styled view. With this feature, XXE can be used to edit XML data, XML documents or a mix of both content types.
  • Proprietary extensions to CSS allow to style attributes, comments and processing instructions.
  • More info in XMLmind XML Editor - Support of Cascading Style Sheets (W3C CSS).
• Can be used to author modular documents, even very fine grained ones.
  • Creating a modular document is easy and safe: simply copy a reference to an element from one place (Ctrl+Shift-C) and paste it elsewhere (Ctrl-V = Paste Into, Ctrl-U = Paste Before or Ctrl-W = Paste After). More info in the tutorial.
  • Fully supports DITA conref.
  • For document types other than DITA, modular documents are implemented using XIncludes.
• Supports many image formats (GIF, JPEG, PNG, SVG, TIFF, BMP, EPS, PDF, etc) through the use of image toolkit plug-ins [A].
  • Supports graphics embedded in the XML document (SVG elements and images encoded in base64Binary) as well as references to external image files.
  • Has an advanced image viewport component which allows to render images on screen in a WYSIWYG fashion (this needs to be specified in the CSS style sheet).
• [PE] Has an easy to use and yet extremely powerful integrated spreadsheet engine.
  • Does not work by embedding an external spreadsheet component in the document: the XML document is the spreadsheet.
  • A formula can address table cells using the usual A1 notation (example: "table1"!$A$1:$C$3). If the formula is itself inside a table cell, it can even use relative cell references (example: A1:C3).
  • The formula language and the predefined functions are very similar to those used by other spreadsheet software. Example: "sum is " & SUM(A1:A3). More than 80 predefined functions are provided.
  • A formula is represented by processing instruction xxe-formula. Using such specific processing instructions is allowed by the XML standard. xxe-formulas are ignored by XML software other than XXE.
• [PE] Can transform the document being edited using a built-in XSLT engine (Saxon) and XSL-FO processor plug-ins [A]. Such XSL-FO processor plug-ins are available for:
  • Apache FOP 0.95. Converts XSL-FO to PDF and PostScript^TM. Incurs no additional costs.
  • XMLmind XSL-FO Converter. Converts XSL-FO to RTF (Word 2000+), WordprocessingML (Word 2003+), Office Open XML (or OOXML or .docx, the native format of Word 2007+), OpenDocument (the native format of OpenOffice.org 2+). Incurs no additional costs.
  • RenderX XEP. Converts XSL-FO to PDF and PostScript^TM. Requires purchasing XEP from RenderX.

  Note that converting the document being edited to PDF simply means selecting the "Convert to PDF" item from a menu. As always with XXE, the user is not supposed to mess with technicalities such as XSLT engines and XSL-FO processors.

• [PE] Can be used to edit documents stored on an FTP, FTPS (FTP over SSL), SFTP (SSH) [A] or WebDAV server [A]. More generally, the editor can be used to edit documents stored in places other than ordinary, local, file systems through the use of virtual drive plug-ins.
  • There are no special commands for doing that, just use File|Open, File|Save and File|Save As.
  • An advanced file chooser dialog box may be used to browse and select files on the local file system, on remote file systems (e.g. FTP, WebDAV).
  • This dialog box has a simple yet handy integrated file manager. For example, it can be used to create, copy, move and delete files and directories on an FTP server.
  • In the case of a WebDAV server, this dialog box also allows to see which files are locked and who is locking them.
• Has both an automatic spell checker [PE] (underlines misspelled words as they are typed) and a ``traditional'' spell checker.
  • Can use attributes such as xml:lang to automatically detect the language of the element being checked.
  • Can be configured to spell check comments, processing instruction having specific targets, specific attributes.
  • Can be configured to automatically skip specific elements.
  • Includes dictionaries for English, French [A], German [A], Spanish [A]. Extra user-contributed dictionaries are also available. These have been built using the Dictionary Builder tool.
• Multi-level undo/redo.
• Bookmarks.
• Literal and regular expression search/replace facilities.
• Has an XPath-based search facility which, for most common tasks, does not require the user to learn XPath.
• Allows to record and replay macro-commands.
• Fully customizable through the use of configuration files (modular XML files conforming to a specific W3C XML Schema). No programming required.
  • XMLmind XML Editor - Configuration and Deployment.
  • XMLmind XML Editor - Commands.
  • [PE] XMLmind XML Editor - Customizing the User Interface.
• Configuration files and .jar files containing extension code can be centralized on an HTTP or FTP server.
• [PE] An end-user can customize an existing configuration to a certain extent, without having to manually edit configuration files or to understand how they work. This is done by the means of the Options|Customize Configuration menu which allows any user to:
  • Save the document being edited as a named template.
  • Save the selected element as a named template.
  • Save the current layout of views as the default one.
  • Add keyboard shortcuts.
  • Change the XSL style sheet parameters used when converting the document being edited to other formats.
• Localized to English, French, German, Czech, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Finnish, Russian.
• Will run on any platform supporting Java^TM 1.5+ (Windows, Linux, MacOS X).
• Fully extensible in Java^TM. Many extension points.
  • XMLmind XML Editor - Developer's Guide.
  • XMLmind XML Editor Java^TM API.
  • [PE] Full source code, the ultimate documentation, is available at no additional cost starting from a 10-user license.
• [PE] Can be deployed using Java^TM Web Start (which is, to make it simple, Web-based automated install and upgrade of desktop applications).
• [PE] Can be deployed as an applet (that is, embedded in an HTML page displayed by a Web browser). See demo.