This presentation will provide a demonstration of the authoring environment for drafting legislation in XML at the U.S. House of Representatives. Legislative drafting is primarily performed by the House Office of Legislative Counsel (HOLC) with a staff of approximately 35 attorneys and 15 support staff. During the past dozen years, HOLC staff have drafted legislation by inserting typesetting codes using a highly customized DOS-based text editing environment. While the benefits of SGML and XML have historically focused on end-user needs such as output flexibility and improved search and retrieval, the attorneys and support staff have found several time-saving and quality-improving benefits by using XML-based authoring. The overall goals for the XML legislative drafting project were (1) improve or, at least, equal the time needed to draft legislation, (2) enable attorneys to focus on legislative language rather than typesetting or XML tagging, and (3) reduce the training needed for new staff. The presentation will review some of the complexities found in a legislative DTD and how the customization of Corel’s XMetaL authoring environment has accomplished the project’s goals. The customization that will be presented includes tagless authoring, autonumbering, tables of contents generation, internal cross reference creation and verification, on-the-fly conversions of text to XML, and a “where am I” feature. XML authoring has proven to be beneficial over conventional authoring techniques and can provide “smart editing” in specialized environments.