An interactive text editor is a computer program that allows a user to create and revise a target document such as program statements, manuscript text, and numeric data through an online terminal and the computer. It allows text to be modified and corrected many orders of magnitude faster and more easily than would manual correction. The most important characteristic of the text editor is its convenience for the user. Such convenience requires a simple, mnemonic command language which is easy to use and understand.

No matter how extended the use of the computer is, the printed document is still the primary medium for the presentation information, and will continue to be for some time. The use of computing facilities for preparation and production of the document is becoming as prevalent as their use for numeric computation. Commercially, document preparation systems are now a standard facility at research institution, and they have become quite common on each computer program. A conventional document preparation system usually contains two parts: a text editor used to create, enter, update, and maintain the text and control words that comprise the document in its "input" form, and a text formatter used to process that input and produce the final document.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between media and content in my work. I began a series of paintings in the fall of 1985 which was based on 35mm transparencies. At this point, the slides were nothing more than a visual aid, a way to augment my technical skills; my chief interest in these paintings was narrative. I was also taking a drawing class at the time, and several times I recycled a transparency I had used with a painting to create a drawing. Sometimes Both versions were relatively successful (though often for very different reasons), other times one version would be more successful than the other. Technical proficiency (or lack of it) did not seem to be the determining factor in these cases.