ABSTRACT

Integrated Editor/Formatters merge the document editing and formatting functions into a unified, interactive system. A common type of Integrated Editor/Formatter, the Exact-representation Editor/Formatter (also known as WYSIWYG), presents an interactive representation of the document that is identical to the printed document. Another powerful metaphor applied to documents has been to describe the document as abstract objects– to describe the document's logical structure, not its physical makeup. The goal of the research reported here is to merge the flexibility found in the abstract object-oriented approach with the naturalness of document manipulation provided by the Exact-representation Editor/Formatters. A tree-based model of documents that allows a variety of document objects as leaves (e.g., text, tables, and mathematical equations) has been defined. I suggest a template-oriented mechanism for manipulating the document and have implemented a prototype that illustrates the mechanism. Further work has concentrated on handling user operations on arbitrary, contiguous portions of the display.