Text Cleaner — a text preparation utility for typesetters and graphic designers, editors, and just about anyone working with text for print or Web publication — has been updated to version 2.0 by the folks at Studio 405.
Text Cleaner, which has been in public beta testing since early February, was designed to eliminate the need for common search-and-replace routines to prepare text for print or Web publication. Correct typesetting marks and input error correction can be handled in one pass. Text Cleaner can clean text directly within QuarkXpress and is compatible with any application that allows copying and pasting.
The application removes multiple spaces, returns and tabs; creates curly or straight quotes; corrects foot and inch measurement marks; corrects apostrophes for year abbreviations; creates or removes en and em dashes; removes spaces before and after tabs, returns, hyphens and em dashes; creates or removes ligatures and ellipses; and removes PC line feeds. It can also remove e-mail quote symbols and convert line breaks to wrapped text. User presets in Text Cleaner save snapshots of settings for instant recall.
As of version 2.0, Text Cleaner lets you enter up to five simultaneous user text strings in order to create custom cleaning operations. And cleaning operations have purportedly been accelerated up to 300 percent. Unlimited user-defined presets can be set and are sorted alphabetically in a pop-up menu.
With Text Cleaner 2, presets can be imported and exported, making possible configuration sharing and easier standardization for multiple Macs. The DropClean application can be set to use any preset by copying and renaming it in the Finder to match a preset name. Routines for cleaning QuarkXpress have been rewritten for accuracy and cleaning of QuarkXpress stories of any size.
System requirements for Text Cleaner 2 are a Power Mac, Mac OS 8.1 to 9.1, 7MB of free RAM, and 8MB of free hard disk space. For more info on the app and the beta program, see the Text Cleaner Web site.