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.

Jay Nelson

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.