# XML styling
**URL:** https://discourse.paraview.org/t/xml-styling/7793
**Category:** Development
**Created:** [August 10, 2021, 2:33pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/xml-styling/7793 "2021-08-10T14:33:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [August 10, 2021, 2:33pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/xml-styling/7793/1 "2021-08-10T14:33:12Z")
XML styling in ParaView is a bit all over the place, I wonder if we should (1) defined a style to be respected among developpers, (2) add a automatic check in gitlab to ensure it is respected and (3) run a script to fix the style in all currently present XML files.
Wdyt @Charles_Gueunet @utkarsh.ayachit @ben.boeckel @cory.quammen ?
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### Author:  [@Charles\_Gueunet](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/Charles_Gueunet)
#### Post date: [August 10, 2021, 2:35pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/xml-styling/7793/2 "2021-08-10T14:35:29Z")
some tools like [xmllint](http://xmlsoft.org/xmllint.html) might be useful
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### Author:  [@cory.quammen](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/cory.quammen)
#### Post date: [August 10, 2021, 2:43pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/xml-styling/7793/3 "2021-08-10T14:43:00Z")
Anything implemented needs to be as automatic as `Do: reformat`. I don’t want to burn up developer and reviewer time worry about XML formatting.
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### Author:  [@ben.boeckel](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/ben.boeckel)
#### Post date: [August 10, 2021, 9:22pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/xml-styling/7793/4 "2021-08-10T21:22:37Z")
If the tool(s) support rewriting the file in a standard way, the repository to add support in is [here](https://gitlab.kitware.com/utils/source-formatters). Once it is there, we can look at getting it configured for the robot to enforce it.
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### Author:  [@danlipsa](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/danlipsa)
#### Post date: [August 11, 2021, 1:57pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/xml-styling/7793/5 "2021-08-11T13:57:20Z")
Note that the documentation element supports a subset of RST so space is significant - text has to start at column 0. The automatic formatting tool will have to take that into account (or the way we format the documentation has to be improved so that we don’t care about spaces).
[https://kitware.github.io/paraview-docs/latest/cxx/ProxyDocumentationFormatting.html](https://kitware.github.io/paraview-docs/latest/cxx/ProxyDocumentationFormatting.html)