Abstract: A data processing system and method are disclosed for editing a text document stored as an alphanumeric string of structured document text and displayed as WYSIWYG text. The invention enables changing emphasis characteristics of a marked area of the WYSIWYG text located within a parent structure of the document. The method displays an emphasis menu of the valid emphasis types for the particular parent structure, indicating which ones of the emphasis types are present in the marked area. The method enables deleting an emphasis type from the marked area and will then remove the displayed present indication in the emphasis menu corresponding to the emphasis type deleted from the marked area. The method also enables adding an emphasis type to the marked area and will then display a present indication in the emphasis menu corresponding to the emphasis type added to the marked area.

Abstract: A method is described for manipulating commonly used elements within a structured document. The method takes advantage of a user's intent in selecting certain keystrokes to complete a task. By making assumptions on the user's intent at the current position within the document and dynamically changing the functions of keystrokes based on those assumptions, the method allows the user to quickly and easily manipulate the commonly used elements of a structured document without having to specify any tag names or markup language, and without having to understand the rules for creating a structured document.

Abstract: A method for hierarchically expanding and contracting element marks in a structured document. The structured document is hierarchically organized, such as documents written in Standardized General Markup Language (SGML). An element consists of a begin tag and its associated content, and may optionally include an end tag. The editor can mark an element, to produce an element mark, to indicate its selection for document processing operations such as moving, copying or deleting the content of the element mark. The element mark can be hierarchically contracted to lower-level element marks by invoking the contract code as appropriate. The method also can be used to adjust a stream mark to an element mark.