Arbortext Editor recognizes and expands character references (converts them to characters), general entity references, and parameter entity references within entity values in an XML document. This behavior is the same as Arbortext Editor's support for an SGML document.

Arbortext Editor recognizes hexadecimal character references of the form &#[xX][0-9a-fA-F]+;. In an XML document. Arbortext Editor will not write out a character reference unless the character cannot be expressed by the encoding of the output file and the character cannot be represented by an entity reference. When Arbortext Editor does write out hexadecimal character references to an XML document, it follows the form &#x[0–9a-f]+;.