The present invention provides a document processing method and system capable of making both global and local settings when inserting, moving, or copying and pasting data, by taking full advantage of the feature of retaining data and set values hierarchically in the system. In document processing for processing original data which has a print format as an attribute, the original data is retained in a tree structure, with each node having attributes, and when moving or copying any desired subtree data in the tree structure, node attributes of the manipulated subtree data is set with the attributes of the source or destination node according to priorities of attributes specified among the levels of the tree structure.