For many years text preparation and document manipulation have been poor relations in the computing world, and it is only recently that they have taken their rightful place in the mainstream of computer research and development. Everyone has their own favourite reason for this change: word processors, workstations with graphics screens, nonimpact printers, or authors preparing their own manuscripts.

Whatever the reason, people in computing have suddenly found themselves using the same equipment and fighting the same problems as those in printing and publishing. It would be nice to say that we are all working happily together, but there are still plenty of disputes (which is healthy) and plenty of indifference (which is not). There is no doubt, however, that this coming together of different disciplines has brought new life and enthusiasm with it.

The international conference on Text Processing and Document Manipulation at Nottingham, is not the first conference to focus on this field of computing. It follows in the footsteps of Research and Trends in Document Preparation Systems at Lausanne in 1981, the Symposium on Text Manipulation at Portland in 1981, La Manipulation de Documents at Rennes in 1983, and the recent PROTEXT conferences in Dublin. We hope, however, that it marks the beginning of a regular series of international conferences that will bring top researchers and practitioners together to exchange ideas and share their enthusiasm with a wide audience.

As the papers for this conference started to come in, a number of themes began to emerge. The dominant theme (in number of papers) was document structures for interactive editing.