Looking for text editor which does ...
Everyone, A basic question... 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. The situation is that I have a large marked-up text document where many paragraphs have varying and (many times) quite long line lengths. For example, a paragraph may consist of three lines, the first may be 250 characters long, the second 50 characters long, and the third 120 characters long -- and I'd like to "regularize" the paragraph with lines exactly 70 characters or less in length (this paragraph is an example of such "regularization".) I'd like to simply select those three lines in the utility, click a button or something, and the text is automagically "regularized" (no hyphenation, one space between words, etc.) It gets quite laborious doing this by hand with my text editor of choice, vi (I use Lemmy, a Windows vi-clone, for most of my text editing needs.) I do NOT want a tool which only globally does this to the whole document (i.e. there are longer lines in the document which I wish to keep unbroken.) And I do NOT want a tool requiring typing in a long command line -- by the time I do that I could regularize the paragraph by hand in my editor. I just want to select and regularize. So, what's out there? Obviously Project Gutenbergers must use various tools to "regularize" paragraphs. (There's no doubt a different word most everyone here uses to describe this process, but I don't know what it is, thus the use of the word "regularize".) Thanks. Jon Noring
Jon Noring <jon@noring.name> writes:
I just want to select and regularize.
Press 'Esc q' (or 'Meta-q') in Emacs, if the pointer sits in the paragraph. In .emacs (or _emacs, the init file) set soemthing like this: (setq-default fill-column 72) -- http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/ | ,__o | _-\_<, | (*)/'(*) Key fingerprint = F138 B28F B7ED E0AC 1AB4 AA7F C90A 35C3 E9D0 5D1C
Karl Eichwalder <ke@gnu.franken.de> writes:
Jon Noring <jon@noring.name> writes:
I just want to select and regularize.
Press 'Esc q' (or 'Meta-q') in Emacs, if the pointer sits in the paragraph. In .emacs (or _emacs, the init file) set soemthing like this:
(setq-default fill-column 72)
I agree, M-q is very powerful! And if it doesn't do what you need let me know and I'll hack up a elisp script to do what you need. Emacs runs very nicely on Windows as well, and if you install cygwin you then can run any of the unixtools and other scripts on whatever you're working on. b/ -- Brad Collins <brad@chenla.org>, Bangkok, Thailand
"Brad" == Brad Collins <brad@chenla.org> writes:
Brad> Karl Eichwalder <ke@gnu.franken.de> writes: >> Jon Noring <jon@noring.name> writes: >> >>> I just want to select and regularize. >> Press 'Esc q' (or 'Meta-q') in Emacs, if the pointer sits in >> the paragraph. In .emacs (or _emacs, the init file) set >> soemthing like this: >> >> (setq-default fill-column 72) Brad> I agree, M-q is very powerful! And if it doesn't do what Brad> you need let me know and I'll hack up a elisp script to do Brad> what you need. fill-region is probably what is needed: select several paragraphs and fill them. I have an elisp macro that fills every paragraph, except the indented lines. And another filling everything except between a markup. Carlo Traverso
On Sun, Jan 16, 2005 at 12:17:05PM +0100, Carlo Traverso wrote:
"Brad" == Brad Collins <brad@chenla.org> writes:
Brad> Karl Eichwalder <ke@gnu.franken.de> writes:
>> Jon Noring <jon@noring.name> writes: >> >>> I just want to select and regularize. >> Press 'Esc q' (or 'Meta-q') in Emacs, if the pointer sits in >> the paragraph. In .emacs (or _emacs, the init file) set >> soemthing like this: >> >> (setq-default fill-column 72)
Brad> I agree, M-q is very powerful! And if it doesn't do what Brad> you need let me know and I'll hack up a elisp script to do Brad> what you need.
fill-region is probably what is needed: select several paragraphs and fill them.
I have an elisp macro that fills every paragraph, except the indented lines. And another filling everything except between a markup.
Carlo, I'd love to see these. Maybe there are enough other emacs users on the list to justify sending it to the list - elsewise, just to me. I'd be happy to set up a tools area at pglaf.org. We made a little headway on this way back when, but for now just have links to gutcheck and one or two others. -- Greg
"Greg" == Greg Newby <gbnewby@pglaf.org> writes:
Greg> On Sun, Jan 16, 2005 at 12:17:05PM +0100, Carlo Traverso Greg> wrote: >> I have an elisp macro that fills every paragraph, except the >> indented lines. And another filling everything except between a >> markup. Greg> Carlo, I'd love to see these. Maybe there are enough other Greg> emacs users on the list to justify sending it to the list - Greg> elsewise, just to me. Greg> I'd be happy to set up a tools area at pglaf.org. We made a Greg> little headway on this way back when, but for now just have Greg> links to gutcheck and one or two others. -- Greg An old version of my pre- and post-processing tools in emacs are in http://www.dm.unipi.it/~traverso/Ebooks/Lsp/dptools.el ; I am currently revising them (making them unicode-compatible), and better documented.
On Sat, 15 Jan 2005 13:37:12 -0700, Jon Noring <jon@noring.name> wrote:
Everyone,
A basic question...
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 Dave -- http://www.morgad.no-ip.info/index.html gpg:0x64B5E037 Distributed Proofreaders: http://www.pgdp.net The NTP server pool http://www.pool.ntp.org
dave morgan wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jan 2005 13:37:12 -0700, Jon Noring <jon@noring.name> wrote:
Everyone,
A basic question...
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
Dave
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 /$ $/, but this is beyond what you are asking for. It is very easy to select a paragraph or two and then hit the rewrap. Josh
Josh wrote:
Dave Morgan wrote:
Jon asked:
I'd like to get the recommendations of the long-timers here for a Windows-based GUI text editor or utility which cleans up *selected* paragraphs of text (in plain text documents) to create uniform line lengths with hard line breaks.
GuiGuts? http://mywebpages.comcast.net/thundergnat/guiguts.html
Let me second this much emphasis. Guiguts is probably the simplest to use and was expressly made for making PGDP texts.
Using DP markup, it can even be set to regularize an entire text document but skip sections marked off with /* */ or /# #/ or /$ $/, 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
Jon Noring wrote:
...
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.)
If you are working on HTML files, how about HTML-Kit (Windows version of Tidy). This does highlighting, will wrap lines to your line length, and also will validate your code, which is more important than line length in HTML. Won't work with plain text of course. ;-) Steve -- Stephen Thomas, Senior Systems Analyst, University of Adelaide Library UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE SA 5005 AUSTRALIA Phone: +61 8 830 35190 Fax: +61 8 830 34369 Email: stephen.thomas@adelaide.edu.au URL: http://staff.library.adelaide.edu.au/~sthomas/ CRICOS Provider Number 00123M ----------------------------------------------------------- This email message is intended only for the addressee(s) and contains information that may be confidential and/or copyright. If you are not the intended recipient please notify the sender by reply email and immediately delete this email. Use, disclosure or reproduction of this email by anyone other than the intended recipient(s) is strictly prohibited. No representation is made that this email or any attachments are free of viruses. Virus scanning is recommended and is the responsibility of the recipient.
On Saturday 15 January 2005 03:37 pm, Jon Noring wrote:
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.
Programmer's File Editor (obsolete, not maintained) will wrap the paragraph the pointer is in up to or under the line length set in the preferences. Or it will do the same for a selected region as well. F7 (reformat paragraph) is the default hotkey I believe. It also supports macros, so you can set up some tricks of your own.
If you want just a text editor and not the whole GUIGUTS, you might try TEXTPAD. It does much of what you want--will reformat marked text to the current window (ok so you have to set it right to begin with), displays CR's as an option, will also join marked lines. It will not remove extra spaces between words, but will I think not hyphenate words. Has macro capability etc. Has been around since 1995. http://www.textpad.com/ .Also does a lot of other neat things convert from DOS , MAC etc. As far as regularizing, if plain text just save text document as html in Word. Extra spaces will be removed. Select entire text and paste back into a text document. Of course this does not do intelligent things like remove spaces before a period, etc. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Noring" <jon@noring.name> To: <gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org> Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2005 3:37 PM Subject: [gutvol-d] Looking for text editor which does ...
Everyone,
A basic question...
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.
The situation is that I have a large marked-up text document where many paragraphs have varying and (many times) quite long line lengths. For example, a paragraph may consist of three lines, the first may be 250 characters long, the second 50 characters long, and the third 120 characters long -- and I'd like to "regularize" the paragraph with lines exactly 70 characters or less in length (this paragraph is an example of such "regularization".) I'd like to simply select those three lines in the utility, click a button or something, and the text is automagically "regularized" (no hyphenation, one space between words, etc.)
It gets quite laborious doing this by hand with my text editor of choice, vi (I use Lemmy, a Windows vi-clone, for most of my text editing needs.) I do NOT want a tool which only globally does this to the whole document (i.e. there are longer lines in the document which I wish to keep unbroken.) And I do NOT want a tool requiring typing in a long command line -- by the time I do that I could regularize the paragraph by hand in my editor. I just want to select and regularize.
So, what's out there? Obviously Project Gutenbergers must use various tools to "regularize" paragraphs. (There's no doubt a different word most everyone here uses to describe this process, but I don't know what it is, thus the use of the word "regularize".)
Thanks.
Jon Noring
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participants (10)
-
Brad Collins -
Carlo Traverso -
D Garcia -
dave morgan -
Greg Newby -
Jon Noring -
Joshua Hutchinson -
Karl Eichwalder -
N Wolcott -
Steve Thomas