Introduction

This manual describes the docspecs system, as implemented in Arboreal 4.0.

The docspecs system allows Arboreal to be extended to support new XML document types. A special XML file, called a docspecs file, contains information about XML document types. This information specifies how Arboreal handles containers, word tagging, metadata extraction, and tag rendering. Arboreal comes with a built-in docspecs file, which provides support for the Archimedes, CDLI, termlist, and Rome (the Arboreal outline format) documents. Minimal support is also provided for XHTML. The built-in docspecs can be accessed from within Arboreal via the ``magic'' URL:

arboreal:skeletons/docspecs.xml

Arboreal will also read a docspecs file that is supplied by the user. This file must be called docspecs.xml and placed in the user's arboreal directory.¹ Information about all new document types should be put into this single file. Document types defined in the user-supplied docspecs will override those in the default docspecs.