LAPIS: smart editing with text structure

INTRODUCTION Text editing is full of small repetitive tasks. Users have a basket of tools for automating such tasks, including search-andreplace, keyboard macros, and text-processing languages like Perl or awk. Among the drawbacks of existing tools are too little power, too little domain specificity, and too-steep learning curves. Automated text editing can also be dangerous; witness the reckless applications of global search-andreplace featured in comp.risks, among them “eLabourated” in a news report about the British government and “arjpgicial turf” on a web site that evidently switched from TIFF to JPEG. Existing automation tools do nothing to help the user catch these kinds of errors.