The document editor: A support environment for preparing technical documents

As understanding of a particular problem domain matures, its tools become more specialized, moving from general low-level tools to more specialized high-level tools. Early work in a field applies the same set of low-level aids to all problems. Gradually more specialized tools emerge as we come to better understand the problem and the tools that are best for it. Since the emergence of the first program editors in the early 1960s we have learned a lot about the editing process and about building editors. Recently several editors specialized for editing program sources, text, and data structures have been developed. To date, little work has been reported on specialized document editors for editing complex text. This paper describes a research effort into identifying the requirements for an interactive environment for editing complex documents and an initial implementation for the environment.