JATS-Con is an annual 1-day event dedicated to all things Journal Article Tag Suite! The event will take place on 16 February, the day before the NISO Plus 2026 conference in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Caleb Clauset from Typefi will attend JATS-Con in person, and Chandi Perera and Robin Dunford will attend the event virtually. Don’t miss their presentation!
XML conversion isn’t the hardest part: Creating JATS in a publishing environment
16 February 2026 | 10:45 am EST
Chandi, Caleb, and Robin worked together to co-author a paper on the development of Typefi Orion, a Microsoft Word®-based XML editorial software for scholarly publishers which is a replacement for Inera eXtyles®. In the paper, the authors discuss how the Typefi team developed Typefi Orion to match the features of the legendary Inera eXtyles software suite while improving wherever possible.
Here’s the abstract:
There have been many attempts to build editorial tools that support XML publishing workflows for the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS), the Book Interchange Tag Suite (BITS), and the Standards Tag Suite (STS)—many of which have been presented at this conference. For most, generating XML is the primary focus and the biggest challenge; but it is actually not the hardest problem to solve.
Inera eXtyles has long been considered the gold standard in JATS, BITS, and STS publishing workflows, but its scheduled retirement in August 2026 is fast approaching. Typefi took this opportunity to build a replacement called Typefi Orion, incorporating extensive input and feedback from actual editors during every stage of development. During this collaborative process, it became clear that the editorial workflow is truly the most challenging piece of the JATS puzzle.
This paper explores the development process used for Typefi Orion and reveals some of the insights gained during the process, including the critical requirements for JATS editorial tools that are often overlooked. We believe in a diverse ecosystem of JATS, BITS, and STS tools, and these findings will help other developers build more effective solutions.