My wife is a long time Mac user and I’m a recent switcher from the Windows world and proud of it (the switch).
Even text in the Windows world is messy. From Windows to Mac is messy. Clean Text clears text pimples better than Clearasil.
Carol has used TextSoap for many years to clean up text on her Mac.
What am I talking about? Remarkably, all text, whether on a Mac or Windows, or from one application to another, is not always created equally.
Frankly, text is messy, even for Windows users. Carol loves her TextSoap and I’ll admit it’s straightforward and works well.
Other folks at Mac360 love BBEdit because of the “text manipulation” features; great for programmers, web page designers, and those who move text around.
Text clean up is often needed to remove unwanted characters from a document, or a program file.
Sometimes you need to kill the bad and keep the good.
What got me started on a search for another text cleaning application for the Mac was a comment from a friend. A Windows friend.
It was a simple, “Jack, you still using a Mac? I hear there’s not much software for Macs.”
It’s the 21st century, people. You’d think that college educated people would have a little more knowledge about the real world.
Still, it got me to thinking, “Is it possible that there’s just one or two applications for Macs in any one category?”
Since I was about to work on a document sent to me by another teacher that I expected to need a huge cleanup (have you seen Microsoft Word’s HTML output?), that gave me a chance to try some new applications.
While TextSoap and BBEdit are nice, they’re also not for the faint of heart, and require a learning curve to get up to speed (not to mention BBEdit’s price tag—who says inflation is dead?).
What I found was an experienced Mac developer called Apimac with a nifty, affordable, and feature-laden Mac application for cleaning text and clearing up all the messes you sometimes find in text.
That’s a mouthful, right?
The problem, of course, isn’t just cleaning up text. It’s cleaning up bad formatting and characters while retaining good format and characters.
And, doing so in such a fashion that you don’t need to wade through 159 pages of PDF to figure it out.
No doubt about it, Rocky. Text is tricky business.
Clean Text is a basic utility that’s easy to master. At the simple end it just removes formatting from text. “Clean text” can then be used in other documents or applications and formatting can be re-applied.
There’s more. Clean Text also removes unwanted spaces, tabs, and returns. All or just a few. It also removes empty lines, alters line feeds (Unix, Mac, and Windows are not the same).
Sometimes, all you want is to take text that’s already formatted, and copy and paste it into a document that won’t let you keep the original formatting.
Clean Text can fix that, too.
There’s a bucket of other features that are handy, such as reverseing text, reversing some characters, reversing words.
You can also convert three periods to ellipsis, handle mangled quotation marks, fix paragraphs, and add and replace characters to tabs, line feeds, sentences, and more.
Frankly, it’s a healthy list of solutions for text formatting problems, including HTML.
What’s great here is that text formatting is a utility category that doesn’t have just one solution application on the Mac. There are many.
That lays to rest one of the issues many Windows users continue to bring up—not as much software available on the Mac.
I’m not a power Mac user (yet), but I’m well above average in that I have over 100 Mac applications, paid for, on my Mac.
Though I come from a Windows background, I’ve yet to run into a problem that doesn’t have a bona fide Mac application solution.
Clean Text is from a developer with a number of great Mac applications, and worthy of the $27 price tag.
What do you use to clean up text on your Mac?
About Jack D. Miller
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