![]() However, scroll on down and you will reach one called Clean with TextSoap 8. Every app you’ve ever installed can provide a Service and so many do that your list is going to be long. If you’ve not been in this before or haven’t looked at Services on the Mac, your head will jerk back at the sheer number of options. It’s the Keyboard pane and Shortcuts/Services will already be highlighted. Choose that and you’re taken to the right section of System Preferences. Since we’re doing this to speed up preparing text that we’ve typed, it would be great if you could just use a keyboard shortcut -and you can.Īt the foot of the Services menu there is Services Preferences option. You forget that it’s there and also to choose it you have to take your hands off the keyboard and use the mouse or trackpad. ![]() Still, there’s a reason that macOS Services menu is so little used. When we’d run it from within another app like Pages or Word or Ulysses, though, we wouldn’t notice the documents at all because we stay in that app as it works. ![]() It’s probably something to do with macOS’s way of making apps reopen the last documents you were working on, but still we had positively chosen to close them. So we’d close them but the next time we’d run TextSoap, it would occasionally reopen a dozen. We’d run it from the Services menu a few times and would sometimes find that it had opened new documents for each occasion. It’s oddly resistant to closing them again, though. It puts that text into its Clipboard Workspace but it’s also possible to open or create documents in TextSoap. In the background, it’s taking that selected text and putting it into its own app before cleaning it up and pasting it back. Choose the little-used Services item from the menu that drops down and then TextSoap does its work. Just select some text then click on the app’s name in the menu bar. Instead, you can call up TextSoap’s features from within practically any Mac app. You don’t have to paste text into the app, though. ![]() If you paste in the HTML source code from a web page, it will extract all the actual text from it. Paste some text into this Mac app and it will remove extra spaces, it will take out extra returns, it can remove every tab and so on. However, where my Thickify for BBC fixed four or five problems, TextSoap 8 does more than a hundred. TextSoap is the same idea and it does the same things. To this day I am proud of that work -and yet I see it was total rubbish compared to TextSoap 8.4.7. So did most of the writers on each of these sites. Probably twenty editors, news editors or assistant editors used it. They believed that it was part of Microsoft Word and when they’d upgrade that word processor, they would actually shout at IT people for apparently removing their big button.Ī dozen BBC websites used it. It was the single most successful piece of work I ever did at the BBC and hardly anyone who used it had any idea that it was mine or that it was a Word macro. I know all this because I wrote Thickify. Instead, since “thick” is British slang for stupid, it was called Thickify. So much so that since it was changing smart quotes into dumb ones, it could’ve been called the Dumber. This Word button handled four or five such common issues but it was the quote marks it was known for. The BBC system had problems with dashes and certain types of parentheses too, plus a constant difficulty with the British pound symbol. Smart quotes, the 66 and 99 marks, used to break the sites, for instance, so they were changed to plain ones. When you clicked it, Word would ready your text to go into websites without any of the usual problems of the time. and hard to master -but so very powerful for writers of all ability levels.įrom 1998 to around 2004, every website editor at BBC Worldwide in the UK had an extra button in their copy of Microsoft Word. TextSoap 8 is supremely handy, easy to start. Hands on: TextSoap 8 cleans up your text for online and publishers
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