Planet Quark

Every designer receives text that needs cleaning up, whether it’s from a client or from an email or website. Here are two handy, time-tested solutions:

Apimac’s Clean Text 6.5 ($25) does three handy things:

• It strips formatting from text you copy to your Mac’s Clipboard, so that the copied text takes on the formatting of the text you’re pasting it into.
• It cleans up the extra gunk (extra spaces, tabs, returns, >s, indents, etc.) from email and Web pages.
• It can optionally convert “dumb” text to “smart” text and vice-versa — straight quotes to curly quotes, ALL CAPS to lowercase or Word Case, three dots to an ellipsis, multiple spaces to a Tab, Windows to Mac encoding, ligature conversion, etc.

MacLab’s Text Cleaner 3 ($89), is similar, but it has a unique feature: it fixes text directly inside a QuarkXPress or InDesign document — without losing the text’s formatting. However, Text Cleaner does not strip text formatting on the Clipboard like Clean Text does.

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