Tools of the Trade: TextSoap
Editor: TextSoap 5.6
Version: 5.6.1 Standard
Developer: Unmarked Software
Platform/OS: Mac
WYSIWYG: No
Price: $29.95/$39.95 USD
So, I’m kicking off a new category of mini-reviews of software I use to get my work done because, let’s face it, HTML editors are great, but they can’t do everything. I’m not going to focus on the big software like Photoshop et al., but rather on some of the smaller shareware/freeware apps that I find myself using quite frequently for different aspects of my business. Likely, you’ll have heard of most of them, but I’m hoping to share and critique a few you haven’t. First up: TextSoap 5.6 from Unmarked Software.
Well, TextSoap isn’t too big of a leap from a text editor — it’s a text transformation tool. In essence, you can use TextSoap (as its name implies) to clean up selected text. For example, you can use it to strip all the HTML code from some copied text, leaving just the content. Or, you can use it to straighten or smarten all the the quotation marks in a document. Or, you can use it to convert text from rich text to internet friendly text. Basically, TextSoap is like an advanced search and replace tool with a number of pre-built transformations already included.
So, you say, why would I buy this if I can do the same thing with regular expressions and the text editor/word processor I already have? That’s a valid question. I guess it would depend on whether or not you can save all those searches and regexes for later use. And not just later use, but ease of use. For example, with TextSoap, I can create a group of cleaners that I frequently use. Then, with the click of my mouse, I can apply all those filters at once to my document. To illustrate: I work on an e-book for one of my clients, and I always have to do the same things to the Word documents I receive from them: I have to remove extra spaces at the ends of sentences, smarten quotes, strip two or more returns, convert three periods to ellipses, and convert hyphens to en or em dashes. With a single click, I can make all those changes in TextSoap, instead of manually proofing or doing five separate find and replace searches.
Software should make your work easier and quicker, and TextSoap does that. I wouldn’t say that it’s for everyone, but if you find yourself doing the same text transformations over and over, I’d say give TextSoap a try and share your impressions.
(NB: This review is of the Standard Mac version. The Deluxe version adds: a contextual menu module, allowing you to use TextSoap in different apps; the ability to use TextSoap in your AppleScripts; BBEdit integration; etc. There is also a Windows version, but I don’t know how it compares or if it’s still in development.)
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