1.  Introduction

xmlformat is a formatter (or "pretty-printer") for XML documents. It is useful when you want XML documents to have a standard format. This includes situations such as the following:

Of course, these benefits can be obtained by using any XML pretty printer. So why does xmlformat exist? Because most XML formatters reformat documents using a set of built-in rules that determine the output style. Some allow you to select from one of several predefined output styles. That's fine if the style you want is the style produced by one of these tools. If not, you're stuck. That's where xmlformat comes in, because it's configurable. You can specify formatting options in a file and xmlformat will apply them to your documents. If you have different applications for which you want different styles, you can select the style by using the appropriate configuration file.

xmlformat has a default overall output style, but you can redefine the default style, and you can override the default on a per-element basis. For example, you can indicate whether the element should be treated as a block element, an inline element, or a verbatim element. For any block element, you can control several formatting properties:

xmlformat is free software. You can redistribute it or modify it under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.

For installation instructions, see the INSTALL file.