David,

I think I could agree with all you said, except a few statements I probably
misunderstood.

> But this means that a sentence can have a carriage return in it...

What does "in it" mean? Not anywhere between its first and its last word.
Deviding a sentence by a <CR> means to turn it into two sentences being
spread over two paragraphs.

> ...for every document I will need to end every field with a period,
> if I want to avoid, in Web Publisher, the "Context" search results
> cell displaying the entire document!

Probably, I don't understand this, because I dont have any experience with
WebPublisher. In AS5, the Proximity Search will always display the entire
document as well, unless you design a report output of fields. Your example
consists of six lines and paragraphs. Inside this structure, you find
8 "John" and 6 "Mary". So try this: Move each paragraph to a document of
its own. When performing Proximity Search for "John" and "Mary" in the same
sentence, AS5 won't display six documents but only two. Maybe, this could
show better which documents comply with the search condition.

Best regards,
Florian