xfpt is a program that reads a marked-up ASCII source file, and converts it into XML. It was written with DocBook XML in mind, but can also be used for other forms of XML. Unlike AsciiDoc, xfpt does not try to produce XML from a document that is also usable as a freestanding ASCII document. The input for xfpt is very definitely "marked up". This makes it less ambiguous for large and/or complicated documents. xfpt is also much faster than AsciiDoc because it is written in C and does not rely on pattern matching.