That's actually what I've been doing - and, in fact, the individual chunks of the script (the various routines) are pretty darned good. What needs rewriting is the overall structure: it's *really* not well-defined, and would be hell for someone else to read despite the copious comments.

> And here's a simple way to eliminate that failure mode 
> you mention: Treat those 'fake' anchors as some of the 
> specific, demarcated chunks of text you want to 
> preserve. That way, you'll simply replace the thing 
> that looks like a marker with a real marker. Then when 
> you plug the original bits back in, you're golden.

Well, as I've said - it's easily avoidable. I just think that there should be a more... graceful way to do this - sort of like using a Schwartzian transform instead of plodding through a bunch of loops and fiddling with temp vars.