Control streams in PTC Arbortext Layout Developer are tags that represent the configuration of some fundamental processing tools. Since control streams can be edited in the PTC Arbortext Layout Developer interface they can be regarded as content streams. Note that they are never displayed in a frame or inline. They can be accessed through the fStream FOM object for editing.

The fControl object also represents control streams when they are accessed as a feature-specific configuration tag. Control streams can either inherit from fStream or fControl, depending on their use.

Examples of control streams include index definitions, footnote definitions, context control streams, super print configurations, colors, rules, frames, layers and so on.

Control streams are made up of a list of keyword/value pairs, each of which configures a specific part of the functionality being addressed.