Documents having a structured nature such as contracts, legislation, etc. can be formatted to emphasize their logical structure. In a document formatting method, a set of document element classes each representing a logical operator may be defined. Each document element class may have a set of document section formatting rules and a defined set of document elements such as text strings that provide an expression of the logical operator of the class. Document elements within a document may be identified and used to classify a document section containing the document elements into one or more of the document element classes. The formatting rules of the classified class may then be used to re-format the particular document section so that a reformatted version of the document section accords with the formatting rules for document sections of that class.