title: Eclipse XML formatter
body: <p>What is a free alternative to the built-in Eclipse XML editor? </p>
  
  <p>The one packaged with the IDE has two major problems with formatting:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>The formatter tries to parse escaped char's as though they were unescaped. E.g. '&amp;lt;' is treated like '&lt;' which causes the formatter to "stop".</li>
  <li><p>White space between elements is not honored:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;foo&gt;   text &lt;/foo&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>will be formatted to: </p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;foo&gt;text&lt;/foo&gt;
  </code></pre></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>We are using Eclipse 3.4.</p>
  
  <h3>Updates</h3>
  
  <p>Issue #1 is a known bug: <a href="https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=238026" rel="noreferrer">Formatting issues with entities in XML files</a>.</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=262206#c7" rel="noreferrer">Apparently</a> the white space formatting is intended functionality.  I have requested this be provided as an option or advise on fixing this in a plugin of my own, but as of yet, no answer.</p>