The AOM provides object-oriented programming access to Arbortext Editor and Arbortext Publishing Engine. The AOM supports the W3C DOM (Document Object Model) interfaces with extensions, and provides many additional interfaces for Arbortext-specific features that are not part of the DOM.

The Arbortext extensions to the DOM use a naming convention where A (for Arbortext) is prefixed to the DOM interface name; for example, the Arbortext extension for the DOM Node interface is ANode.

The AOM supports bindings to Java, COM (Component Object Model), and C++. The AOM also provides scripting access to its interfaces using JavaScript, JScript, VBScript, and ACL (Arbortext Command Language).