I support what Eric said.

It partly depends of whether the XML is document oriented (TEI, Docbook,
HTML, etc) or data oriented (RDF, various config files, MARCXML, etc).
Document oriented has natural representations which to fall back on, often
data oriented doesn't, unless that data has presentations it is widely used
in and your familiar with.

Cheers
Stuart

--
...let us be heard from red core to black sky

On Tue, 31 Mar 2026, 7:37 am Eric Lease Morgan, <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Mar 30, 2026, at 2:14 PM, Canino, Adrienne <
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > Anyone have a favorite tool for make XML 'render' into a document
> friendlier for humans to read?
> > Latex? Oxygen Editor? Ideally this would be a lightweight tool on a
> local machine (meaning chromebook friendly) or browser magical widget.
> >
> > --
> > Adrienne Canino (she/her)
> > Data Librarian (MLIS)
> > TetraTech Ocean Sciences
> > Anchorage, Alaska
>
>
> Yes, XML can be difficult to read, and, in general, there are two ways to
> make it more readable: 1) formatting it, and 2) transforming it. The former
> is relatively easy through the use of a widely available command-line
> program called xmllint. Try:
>
>   $ xmllint --format <file.xml>
>
> Xmllint will look at your file, verify that it is well-formed (or not),
> and then collapse and indent things for more easier reading. You can pipe
> the result through to a pager to see the result one screen at a time, kinda
> like this:
>
>   $ xmllint --format <file.xml> | less -S
>
> A program called HTML Tidy does much the same thing. [1]
>
> If you want to make your XML really easier to read, then maybe you are
> wanting to transform the XML into some other format, like HTML, a plain
> text file, a CSV file, et cetera. If you want to do these sorts of things,
> then that is something else altogether.
>
> Finally, while searching for Tidy I see there may be more than a handful
> of Web-based tools to make your XML easier to read. I haven't tried any of
> them.
>
>
> [1] https://www.html-tidy.org/documentation/
>
> --
> Eric Morgan <[log in to unmask]>
>