A document processor is a document preparation system that superficially resembles a word processor

Word processor

A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....

. However, the emphasis in a document processor is on the arrangement of the document's components, not the formatting of the characters that compose it. The available tools are not just typical document elements—paragraphs, lists, headers—the primary attraction of a document processor is the ability to program documents with powerful conditional automatic formatting rules to create structured document

Structured document

A structured document is an electronic document where some method of embedded coding, such as markup, is used to give the whole, and parts, of the document various structural meanings according to a schema...

s, which allow large numbers of similar elements to be generated and reformatted for different media with little human effort.

Examples of document processors include programs like PTC

Parametric Technology Corporation

Parametric Technology Corporation is a U.S.-based company that develops, markets and supports software for product development. Its main products are for CAD/CAM, engineering calculations, and product lifecycle management. Its customers include companies in manufacturing, publishing, services,...

 Arbortext, Adobe

Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...

 FrameMaker

FrameMaker

Adobe FrameMaker is a document processor for the production and manipulation of large structured documents. It is produced by Adobe Systems. Although FrameMaker has evolved slowly in recent years, it maintains a strong following among professional technical writers.- Overview :FrameMaker has more...

, LyX

LyX

LyX is a document processor following the self-coined "what you see is what you mean" paradigm , as opposed to the WYSIWYG ideas used by word processors...

, BroadVision

Broadvision

BroadVision is an international software vendor of self service web applications for enterprise social software, electronic commerce, Enterprise Portals, CRM....

 QuickSilver (formerly Interleaf

Interleaf

Founded in 1981, Interleaf was a company that created software products for the technical publishing creation and distribution process. Its initial product was the first commercial document processor that integrated text and graphics editing, producing WYSIWYG output at near-typeset quality...

), and Syntext Serna

Syntext Serna

Syntext Serna is a WYSIWYG XML editor from Syntext, Inc. Syntext Serna works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Sun Solaris/SPARC.- XML editing features :...

. Examples of markup language

Markup language

A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts...

s used for non-graphical document processing include SGML/XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

, LaTeX

LaTeX

LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...

 and troff

Troff

troff is a document processing system developed by AT&T for the Unix operating system.-History:troff can trace its origins back to a text formatting program called RUNOFF, written by Jerome H. Saltzer for MIT's CTSS operating system in the mid-1960s...

.