A document processor is a computer application that superficially resembles a word processor—but emphasizes the visual layout of the document's components, above creation and formatting of text. Document processor tools are not just typical document elements—paragraphs, lists, headers, etc. The primary attraction of a document processor is the ability to program documents with strong layout controls and powerful conditional automatic formatting rules that create structured documents. This facilitates creating large numbers of similar elements generated and reformatted for different media with little human effort.
Examples of document processors include programs like PTC Arbortext APP (formerly Advent 3B2,) Adobe FrameMaker, LyX, BroadVision QuickSilver (formerly Interleaf TPS,) and Syntext Serna. Examples of markup languages used for non-graphical document processing include SGML/XML, LaTeX and troff.