Maybe OT....but?

[Tim]

Allegedly, on or about 08 November 2013, Roger sent:
> I have need to create a small dedicated web page newsletter with a 
> number of plain text areas that may contain 50 - 1000 words.
> 
> The contributor would copy and paste plain text layed out in sentences
> and paragraphs with appropriate markups like <i> or <b>. Quotations 
> where included in the text passage would be delimited by <i>.

For what it's worth, since you mention "appropriate" mark-up, then <i>
is not an appropriate mark-up for a quote.  If you actually use correct
mark-up (i is merely for italics, b for bold, em for emphasised, q for
quotes, or simply using normal quote characters, et cetera), then you
stand a better chance of getting correct parsing of data.

It sounds like you just want a search engine.  Whether you want/need to
find a ready-made one that works for your case, or you need to make your
own specialised one up, isn't entirely clear from your posting.  If you
want to make your own, or customise an existing one, perhaps you should
look at an existing one (e.g. htdig), to garner ideas about how to do
it.

I mention one, htdig, because I've used it as a general purpose search
engine on our intranet, and know that you can tailor its output in
various ways, just by customising the HTML templates it uses to
construct its results pages.  For more complex customising, you might
look at its coding, and work things out from there.

There's bound to be others, but since you mentioned postgres, it'd seem
that you most want to learn about databases, first.  Most search engines
periodically update their database, it sounds like you need something
different, if you want instant updating.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point
trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the
public lists.

George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.