Francis Cave Digital Publishing was established in September 1999 with the aim of delivering a range of XML consultancy, training, system design and implementation services. It is the trading name of Francis Cave, an XML expert with more than twenty years' experience in the field.

The range of services currently on offer includes:

• advice on all aspects of the use of XML in publishing, including:
  • strategic reviews, technical audits, feasibility studies and business case development
  • project design, including DTD, schema and stylesheet design and development
  • design of editorial and production workflows, including XML First and XML Last
  • data capture and conversion methods, especially using popular office word processing tools and professional page layout systems
  • editorial, content management and production system selection, integration and configuration
  • processing XML for paper-based delivery
  • processing XML for online and other modes of electronic delivery
• introductory and advanced training in XML editing, DTD and schema writing
• quality assurance in XML publishing projects

Recent and current development projects in which Francis has or is played a leading role include:

• development of XML DTDs, schemas and associated XSLT scripts for global e-commerce trading standards for the book and serials industries, including the ONIX and EDItX families of XML formats published by EDItEUR and a series of web service standards published by Book Industry Communication.
• development of software tools for checking the use of styles in Word files, and for converting them to DocBook and EPUB.
• development of software tools for importing XML content into Adobe InDesign documents, enabling more controlled placement of content within a document and the ability to import updated XML content without disrupting document layout.
• development of software tools for transforming from XML to Word and vice versa.

Francis Cave chairs IST/41, the Technical Committee of BSI responsible for a range of XML standards associated with document description and processing. In October 2017 he was appointed Chair of the corresponding international standards committee ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 Document description and processing languages, which is involved in the maintenance of several important international standards, including the XML schema languages RELAX NG and Schematron, and specifications for the office document file formats used by popular software tools such as Microsoft Office, OpenOffice and LibreOffice, and more recently the EPUB 3.0 specification. Starting with version 1.3, he is a co-editor of the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF).