2.2 Readability of XML source documents

XML-Files often aren’t friendly to the user’s eye. Readability can be improved by hiding XML tags like <p>. Also character references of the form &#xNNNN; can be substituted with the corresponding glyphs.

Command: standoff-xml-tags-invisible

(‘Stand-Off->Hide/Show XML-tags’) Hide XML tags when they are visible, show them, when they are invisible.

Command: standoff-xml-toggle-char-ref-glyph-substitute

(‘Stand-Off->Substitute character references with glyphs’) Replace XML character references with the corresponding glyph.

When executing, these commands take some time. On larger files (some MBs), you might have to wait a minute.

Hiding these XML internals makes sense not only regarding human readability. It also helps making the annotations syntactically correct. Starting or ending a markup range inside an XML tag or character reference would result in an error or in invalid XML, when internalized. By hiding these internals, a markup range can never start or end inside.

But hiding can result in bad performance of the editor. For solving this, Performance.