TextSoap

Latte Other Software & Development
1

I’m kind of surprised that this software hasn’t been mentioned here yet (that I’ve found, at least). First off, the site:

TextSoap 5 homepage

TextSoap is a program that cleans text. It’s hard to get any more specific than that because there’s so many options. I personally use TextSoap the most when I’m preparing content for publishing online (served as Editor-in-Chief at Inside Mac Games, and publish my own stuff elsewhere). However, it is also incredibly useful in a number of other scenarios, and thanks to the fact that it supports regular expressions and some very powerful custom cleaner abilities the options are pretty wide-open.

I highly recommend the deluxe version of the program: the contextual menus make using the program ridiculously easy.

That said, there’s some issues with TS. One big one is that it sometimes does really weird stuff with RTF encoded text that has different styles in it. Every once in a while I’ll run a cleaner on a bunch of text with one bold word and have it all come out bold. Thankfully the dev is very responsive, so this kind of thing will hopefully be fixed soon.

This is one of those programs that you really have to download and try out. It’s really hard to explain why it’s a cool piece of software, but it’s found a solid place in my workflow.

2

George-thy-fleaness, thanks so much for the post. What a great idea. This is one of those really useful things that one only thinks of at deadline time :astonished: Cheers!

3

I use the free WordService from Devon to do this; not sure it does everything TextSoap does, but it does all the cleaning up I need. Works through the Services menu.
There’s also PlainClip, but I haven’t used that in quite awhile.

4

TextSoap Deluxe is indispensable.

5

Major TextSoap fan here. There are contenders, yes. WordService from
Devon, and some built-in text cleaners: in BBEdit, Tex-Edit Plus (a very nice
text editor from Taylor Design), even the once-lovely, now-bloated
SpellCatcher. Used to be a nice one called TexTpresso, I think, but I don’t
know what every became of it. All have something to offer.
But for me TextSoap knocks them all out of the ring.

Good call to post this, Siphonaptera, G.

Tim

6

I decided to try TextSoap and Clean Text today. I must say I rather prefer the first, not so much by the text modifying options (although indeed TextSoap has some more), but specially by the UI and services (via contextual menu).

– MJ