We describe the use of XML tokenisation, tagging and mark-up tools to prepare a corpus for parsing. Our techniques are generally applicable but here on parsing Medline abstracts with the ANLT wide-coverage grammar. Hand-crafted grammars inevitably lack coverage but many coverage failures are due to inadequacies of their lexicons. We describe a method of gaining a degree of robustness by interfacing POS tag information with the existing lexicon. We also show that XML tools provide a sophisticated approach to pre-processing, helping to ameliorate the `messiness' in real language data and improve parse performance.