Serna Free is an Open Source XML editor now

Easy XML Authoring

XML authoring in Syntext Serna is easy enough for anyone to be involved in the process of creating structured XML content regardless of their technical or XML experience.

XML Authoring Modes


  • WYSIWYG Mode. This XML authoring mode is very close to a conventional word processor. An XML document is rendered very close to its published view: XML authoring in print appearance.
  • Markup Mode. Though XSL stylesheets do their best to represent an XML document conveniently without markup tags, sometimes seeing XML tags is helpful, e.g. when editing script-like documents or arbitrary XML files (those without a specific stylesheet and/or XML Schema) that are rendered with the default stylesheet. The Markup XML authoring mode covers this issue.
  • Plain Text. Text XML authoring mode with XML syntax highlighting is convenient when an XML document cannot be parsed or when advanced intervention is required (specific XML source code editing such as manually fixing invalid XML documents, changing DOCTYPE declaration, etc).

Large XML Document Support


  • Automatic large document deduction. Serna does its best to determine if the XML document being opened is going to be large. If so, it can open the XML document collapsed, so that the user may work on a specific part of the document after expanding it.
  • Large document collapse list. It is possible to specify for a particular document type what elements should be collapsed if the XML document is large.
  • Element density and large document limit. It is possible to specify for a particular document type how many elements per page the document usually contains and after how many pages it should be considered as large.

Multilingual Spell Checking

Spell checking is based on Aspell library and supports all the languages which are supported by Aspell (approximately 30 languages). However, only English is included in the distribution. Users may optionally download additional dictionaries.
  • User-customizable dictionaries. Users can create their own dictionaries (add words to a dictionary) in the process of spell-checking.
  • Element ignore. Allows you to skip not just words, but the whole current element (which is useful for program listings, etc).
  • Context-sensitive spelling language. Spell checker changes the spelling dictionary automatically on the values of xml:lang and lang attributes.