Clean Your Text, Even Inside QuarkXPress
MacLab’s Text Cleaner 3 ($89, Mac only) fixes text formatting mistakes in text files, as well as in text copied from a QuarkXPress document — without losing the text’s formatting.
- optionally removes multiple spaces, returns and tabs
- removes PC Line feeds
- removes email quote symbols
- removes line breaks
- creates curly or straight quotes
- corrects foot and inch marks
- corrects apostrophes for year abbreviations (’98)
- creates or removes en and em dashes
- creates or removes ligatures and ellipses
- removes spaces before and after tabs, returns, hyphens and em dashes
- removes spaces before a period
- replaces non-websafe characters with their websafe counterparts
- removes html code
- converts 3 periods to an ellipsis
You can also apply a Find-and-Replace routine and save combinations of settings as presets for future use. This is a true workhorse utility that you’ll find yourself turning to again and again.
If you only need to clean up plain text files and want to save some money, try Apimac’s Clean Text ($35, Mac only). It does much the same thing, but only on plain text files.
Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.
I tried Text Cleaner 3, Clean Text and TextSoap by unmarked software. I chose Clean Text and TextSoap. Clean Text is good for up to a single paragraph and TextSoap is good for whole documents. The clincher for me with TextSoap is its ability to allow you to create custom cleaners which can be saved and used again and again at the click of the mouse.
Interesting! Text Cleaner also lets you save presets within the program, and also as standalone droplets. But it’s the ability to clean text copied from within QuarkXPress or InDesign *without losing its formatting* that made me shout with delight. :-)
I tried Text Cleaner 3, Clean Text and TextSoap by unmarked software. I chose Clean Text and TextSoap. Clean Text is good for up to a single paragraph and TextSoap is good for whole documents. The clincher for me with TextSoap is its ability to allow you to create custom cleaners which can be saved and used again and again at the click of the mouse.