Ryan, that reminds me of something I've been thinking of -- Is there already a good, standard API out there for manipulating abstract rich text? Generally, tree/DOM-like structures are used to represent structured documents, like the Swing model interface you mentioned. But we also have things like an HTML DOM, even an XML DOM of based on the XSL:FO vocabulary. Interesting thing about the XSL:FO stuff is it would give an immediate interop with Apache FOP to target output formats like PDF. OpenOffice's text format is also a superset of XLS:FO.
-Rob
