First thing on a bitterly cold morning, what leaps into my head is TrailBlazer. Better ideas will prevail.


I wrote this 25 years ago when web pages began arriving. I would see a word or phrase in a web page, not know what it was, and debate whether to look it up (which I should do if it appeared throughout the page) or just ignore it (if it appeared just this once).


In your case suppose that you have a phrase [[[some steps to do (punctuation)]]] and it is part of a larger chunk of text that is spread across 300 pages of your "completed" document.


You learn that you need to make a change in all occurrences of the phrases that contain the phrase some steps to do (punctuation).

Edit/Find or Edit/replace would do the trick.


But if you select the phrase some steps to do (punctuation) and set Trailblazer to work, every instance of some steps to do (punctuation) will be linked in a circular hyperlink trail. You can visit each occurrence of the phrase to see what the effect will be, in the context of proposed changes at each occurrence before you go ahead and start making changes.


If you are interested in an fully automatic propagation of change, then you will need the Edit/Find and also some Edit/Replace code (which is used in TrailBlazer) and probably some auxiliary code. It would be nice to be able to undo some or all of your changes if they "went wrong".


Cheers, Chris