Text formatting by demonstration

In text formatters such as troff, Scribe, and TEX, users write macro procedures to specify the desired visual appearance. In What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get text formatters, such as MacWrite and Microsoft Word, the formatting is specified by directly manipulating the text. However, some important functionality is lost in these systems since they are not programmable, For example, if the user wants to change the formatting and content of all the chapter headings or page headings, each one must be individually edited. If they had been generated by macros, then editing the macro definition would change them all at once. This paper describes the design for a demonstrational text formatter that allows the user to directly manipulate the formatting of one example, and then the system automatically creates the macro by generalizing the example. This technique makes the formatting for headers, itemized lists, tables, bibliographic references, and many other parts of documents significantly easier to specify and edit.