rectpara.el is a system to work on blocks of text layed-out
roughly as rectangles. I call these "rectparas" for "rectangular
paragraphs".  It contains two modes, rectpara-mode (a variant of
picture-mode), and a secondary mode, rectpara-edit-mode (a
variant of text-mode).  The general idea is you select a rectpara
you need to change, the system extracts it from the original
buffer, and moves it to an edit buffer, then when done you return
it to the original location.  The system detects automatically if
other things need to be moved around to prevent to new version
from overwriting some existing text.

DOCUMENTATION

Some online documentation is available at:

  http://obsidianrook.com/devnotes/rectpara

There are also notes included inside the rectpara.el file.

INSTALLATION

Quoting from rectpara.el

;; Installation and set-up:
;;  Put the rectpara.el file into a location in your load-path,
;;  and add something like the following to your ~/.emacs
;;  (this uses the single character prefix I prefer, Alt-o):

;;    (require 'rectpara)
;;    (global-unset-key "\M-o")   ;; I want this, facemenu.el can't have it
;;    (rectpara-standard-setup  (kbd "M-o") )

## Copyright 2002, 2016 Joseph Brenner
##
## Author: doom@kzsu.stanford.edu
## Keywords: