Our editors adhere to the Australian Standards for Editing Practice, which are ratified by the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd) as best practice for professional editing in Australia. The standards cover all aspects of document editing and production:

• A. The publishing process, industry conventions and practice (editing and proofreading; legal and ethical concerns; design, typography and formatting; technology relevant to editing practice; and reproduction)
• B. Management and liaison (project definition; project documentation; and monitoring)
• C. Substance and structure (appraisal; and techniques)
• D. Language and illustrations (clarity; voice and tone; grammar and usage; spelling and punctuation; specialised and foreign material; and illustrations and tables)
• E. Completeness and consistency (integrity; tools and procedures; text; illustrations and tables; and format, layout and reproduction).

It is critical that editing follows standards and best practices in style and design for print and web documents. Xmplar sets high standards in, firstly, following clients' corporate style guides when editing and designing documents. We ask clients to supply other publications that we should follow when designing the layout, such as a report in a series that must follow specific design considerations.

The Australian Government Style manual (6th ed) is our default standard—so if a client needs guidance on style, we recommend that publication.

XML desktop editing incorporates typesetting for ebooks, so we must also follow various standards and specifications when designing electronic documents. At a minimum, these include:

• XHTML 1.1 (for EPUB and web pages)
• CSS 2.1 (for EPUB and web pages)
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (e.g. alternate text for images)
• XSLT (our stylesheets conform to version 1 of this XML technology, and include extensions for RenderX XEP)
• XSL-FO (for designing page-based content and transforming to PDF documents).

We are developing capabilities with scalable vector graphics (SVG) and aim to offer a SVG graphics conversion and design service in the near future. SVG is an XML format for representing vector linework for graphics, and can be reproduced in PDF documents as well as being supported by various types of web browsers.