Josh wrote:
Dave Morgan wrote:
Jon asked:
I'd like to get the recommendations of the long-timers here for a Windows-based GUI text editor or utility which cleans up *selected* paragraphs of text (in plain text documents) to create uniform line lengths with hard line breaks.
GuiGuts? http://mywebpages.comcast.net/thundergnat/guiguts.html
Let me second this much emphasis. Guiguts is probably the simplest to use and was expressly made for making PGDP texts.
Using DP markup, it can even be set to regularize an entire text document but skip sections marked off with /* */ or /# #/ or /$ $/, but this is beyond what you are asking for.
It is very easy to select a paragraph or two and then hit the rewrap.
Several of you replied to my request, both in public and in private, and I want to thank each of you for your feedback. It turned out that I used Power Edit 2.1 (the downloadable trial version) to do the job that needed doing at the time. It allowed me to select the exact text and to regularize/rewrap it by pushing a single "hot key" which I specially assigned to this operation (I used the 'F1' key as the "hot key" -- my right hand did the text selection with the mouse, and my left finger pushed 'F1', so I was able to "machine gun" the whole text in no time flat, yet get the fine control I needed.) The adjustable line length was set to the desired value before I began the rewrapping. Power Edit 2.1 also has a fairly nice HTML highlighting feature which is quite flexible in tailoring (although a little buggy since I could not edit the html.syn file to recognize and specially highlight entities: "&...;" -- probably a bug in handling the "&" character.) The other two recommended solutions I looked at was NoteTab Pro 4.95 (the working trial version) and GuiGuts. NoteTab Pro is in many ways a more powerful text editor than Power Edit, and I was very impressed with its feature set. I was even able to add a button to the buttonbar to do the rewrap; however, every time I pushed the rewrap button, it brought up an annoying menu asking me how many characters I want to rewrap the selected text (it was preset already.) This added another unneeded step in the process. Why it doesn't allow one to optionally set this beforehand with no query, as Power Edit does, is sort of strange (maybe it does, but I could not find how to turn this off.) NoteTab Pro also has an HTML highlighting feature, which isn't quite as powerful as that for Power Edit 2.1, but it works (as noted above, I like the ability to highlight the style of the markup, and not only the color -- making the tags bold, for example, helps to see them better.) GuiGuts also worked excellently, and as Dave and Josh noted, is specially designed for the particular needs of PG texts. On the downside for the particular task of rewrapping, GuiGuts does not appear to allow the end-user (although I'm not sure) to reassign hot keys for particular tasks to something more convenient (the rewrap was by default hot-keyed to "Alt-s-r", which is more difficult to enable than pushing a single button -- I would have wanted to temporarily reassign 'Alt-s-r' to 'F1', for example.) Also, it seems like GuiGuts does not highlight markup (again not sure on this), a feature I think is important when editing marked up (versus plain) texts. On the up side, GuiGuts has a lot of cool features which Power Edit and NoteTab Pro don't appear to have. For example, the convenient way GuiGuts will insert Unicode characters (I assume it will save the resulting text as UTF-8 or UTF-16?) It also handles the unusual annoyances found in creating/editing/marking-up PG texts that those who build general text editors are not aware of. Anyway, just my impressions. Thanks again, everyone. Jon Noring