JEdit is under the GPL, so we couldn;t even borrow some of its code. We might be best off looking for examples from eclipse.org or apache.org. The latter might have an example editor using JDOM. The article mentions a number of features that we might want to consider, such as autocomplete. John -- John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer Abilitiessoft, Inc. http://www.abilitiessoft.com Madison, Wisconsin USA Developing software for people with disabilities