Yes, I've come to that same conclusion. I've decided to go with Notepad++ - I already tested it, and it does everything I need, with instaneous response times. It also has automatic formatting by content, which Word does not - you have to apply formatting to the actual text, either by styles or directly, but you have to do it. Notepad++ allows a formatting definition, so specific patterns of text are automatically displayed formatted. That also serves as a check on content. If I define, for instance, the pattern .AU to be formatted in blue and bold, and the user accidentally types .AV, the formatting does not apply and they have an immediate visual clue that they made a mistake.

What the users actually need to do with the contents is pretty much the same as any other text document: search/replace, and manually edit the text. I know it looks weird - it's a legacy format that serves as the source for a historical book and manuscript library catalogging system. The results then get vacuumed up by Access into a custom database, but that's outside the scope of this issue, and it works well in any case.

Word is great for a great many things, and is the default for any work with text in our institution, but there are peculiar cases that give it fits, and this is clearly one of them.