The process of authoring document-centric XML documents in humanities disciplines is very different from the approach espoused by the standard XML editing software with the data-centric view of XML. Where data-centric XML is generated by first describing a tree structure of the encoding and then providing the content for the leaf elements, document-centric encodings start with content which is then marked up. In the paper we describe our approach to authoring document-centric XML documents and the tool, xTagger, originally developed for this purpose within the Electronic Boethius project, otherwise enhanced within the ARCHway project, an interdisciplinary project devoted to development of methods and software for preparation of image-based electronic editions of historic manuscripts.