Review:
textSOAP 1.3
by Frank Petrie, South Jersey Apple/Macintosh Users Group
The scenario
You've embarked upon your morning cruise of your favorite Mac news websites when
you come across an article that you think would be of great interest to the other
members of the user group. So you save the page as a text file and prepare to upload
it to the BBS or email it. But when you open it up with your word processor, you
find tons of extraneous garbage where the graphics used to be (HTML text) and the
formatting is all over the place.
Now, you could sit there and cleanup the document by removing all those nasty things
one-by-one and then spend even more time tediously reformatting the text, but this
is a computer. It should be able to do all of this for you automatically.
The solution
textSOAP 1.3. textSOAP is a utility that will cleanup text downloaded >from the
Internet. And it is so simple to use that you can literally cleanup your text in
two and a half steps.
First, copy the desired text to your clipboard. Next, launch textSOAP. The application
"understands" why you are launching it, so it automatically takes what
you have on your clipboard and places it in a new window (that's what I consider
a half step). Now, press command-K and it will "scrub" the text and leave
it looking just as it would have if you had spent all your time doing it manually.
For most people, that would be enough. But Mark Munz, the program's author, has also
broken down the "scrub" function into all of its separate components, known
as "cleaners".
Version 1.3 comes with 17 other built-in options for cleaning, including:
- -spaces; this cleaner takes multiple spaces and replaces it with a single space,
plus removes leading spaces at the beginning of a line.
- -forwarding; this cleaner removes the forwarding characters on a line (the '>"
character found in your e-mail).
- -paragraphs; this cleaner will convert multi-line paragraphs (with hard carriage
returns <CR>) into a single paragraph.
- -Capitalize Sentences; this cleaner will convert text to lowercase, capitalizing
the first character of each sentence.
- -Control Chararacters; this cleaner deletes all control characters from the selected
text (except for carriage returns).
textSOAP also includes plug-ins and/or support for Eudora, Emailer, Outlook Express,
Mailsmith, and contextual menu savvy applications.
My wife and I both tried textSOAP and we came to the same conclusion. After using
it just one time, we found textSOAP invaluable. If you download a lot of articles
from the Net, or forward jokes and articles found on the web to others, you'll immediately
appreciate the convenience of this program. And I mean immediately.
Once you use textSOAP, I think that you'll agree that textSOAP fills a specific niche
perfectly and inexpensively. Try the 21 day trial period and see what you think.
unmarked software
http://www.unmarked.com
Shareware; $15.00
copyright 1998 Frank Petrie
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