Nearly everyone who uses computers has some sort of word processing program, but folks who handle a lot of raw text, whether it's for Website work, some other sort of professional writing, or just managing text downloaded off the Web or from emails, really need a text-editor.

Text-editors are utilitarian, no-frills, first cousins of the word-processor, lacking heavy-duty formatting capabilities and the ponderous inventory of features one finds in programs like MS Word, Nisus Writer, WordPerfect, and even AppleWorks. No styles, no on-the-fly spellchecking (or built-in spellchecking at all), no mail merge, and no desktop publishing pretensions. Text-editors are designed to handle plain text without a lot of distractions. SimpleText, the little application that has shipped with the MacOS since the early days (it used to be called TeachText) is a very rudimentary text-editor.

As the BBEdit Lite manual puts it,

"Unlike a word processor, which is designed for preparing printed pages, a text editor focuses on providing means of producing and changing content. Thus, BBEdit Lite doesn’t offer fancy formatting capabilities, headers and footers, graphics tools, a thesaurus, and other staples of modern feature-laden "office" software. Instead, it focuses on helping you manipulate text in ways that word processors generally can’t.... Whether you need to find (or change!) all the occurrences of some text in a set of files, or modify or reformat large text files of any sort, or quickly tweak a Web page, BBEdit Lite is the right tool for the job."

There are several text-editors available for the Mac platform, most of them shareware or freeware, but for most of this column I shall be concentrating on the two most popular basic test editing programs -- Tom Bender's $15 shareware Tex- Edit Plus, and BareBones Software's freeware BBEdit Lite.

Both of these programs perform essentially the same core tasks, but differ in peripheral capabilities. For years now, Tex-Edit Plus, and its predecessor, Tex-Edit, have been mainstays of mine -- indeed the first application I open after my email programs. However, to research this column I have also been trying out the latest 4.6 version of BBEdit Lite, and I can honestly say that I would be quite comfortable using it as my main text-editor as well.

I rarely create complete documents from start to finish with a text-editor, but I use it constantly for roughing out manuscripts, and for viewing and modifying documents created elsewhere. Also, everything I write that gets published on the Web passes through a text editor (usually several times), and ends up archived as a text document.

One of the coolest functions of both Tex-Edit Plus and BBEdit is their facility for stripping DOS line-feeds and carriage-returns from text downloaded from the Web or emails. Tex-Edit Plus offers more features and flexibility in this regard, but BBEdit Lite will get the basics done. I also use these programs as quick viewers for reading downloaded text files, for editing text of course, and as minimalist HTML editors.

Another handy facility of text-editors is that they will usually open documents created in other programs that may not be open when you just want to have a quick peek at the contents. Both of our main subjects will open MS Word, Nisus, and AppleWorks WP files with the main body text intact and readable, although WordPerfect files look pretty messy in plain text.

Both programs are small, fast, easy-to-use, require little memory, and have clean, uncluttered interfaces. There is little to choose between them in terms of basic document window appearance, however, Tex-Edit Plus offers an extremely cool popup menu on the lower left that shows a palette of ASCII characters and symbols, which is balanced by BBEdit Lite's optional five-button toolbar which offers access to frequently-used functions as well as showing useful document information.

One difference is that Tex-Edit Plus is a full-fledged program in its own right, while BBEdit Lite, as its name implies, is a stripped-down version of Bare Bones' very full-featured $119 commercial software BBEdit HTML and text editor, offering a subset of BBEdit's technology and feature set. BBEdit Lite is built from the same core code and text-processing engine as BBEdit 5.1.1. BBEdit Lite includes support for the BBEdit plug-in architecture. A number of useful plug-ins that automate common text conversion tasks are included with the freeware package. Third party plug-ins are also available to handle even more editing tasks.

Tex-Edit Plus counters with its comprehensive AppleScript support, including a broad selection of "prefabricated AppleScripts that can be downloaded from a link on the Trans-Tex Software Website. Tex-Edit's "scriptability" means that the programmer has given AppleScript access to major portions of the application’s inner workings. Tex-Edit, is also "recordable." Apple’s Script Editor can record your actions as you use Tex-Edit. The resulting "script" (program) can be saved and re- played later. Extensive information on how to unleash Tex-Edit Plus's AppleScript capabilities is included in the download package.

You can also visit Doug Adams’ AppleScript archive, which is devoted specifically to scripting Tex-Edit and contains an AppleScript guide for beginners:

http://www.malcolmadams.com/te/

One very cool feature of BBEdit Lite is its ability to assign key equivalents to all menu commands via the "Set Menu Keys" option.

Both programs allow you to open documents by dropping them on application icons, drag text selections around within open documents, and to select any data in any program window and move it to any other program window. No cutting, no copying, no pasting, no program switching, no messing with data translations. Easier to learn and much faster than the clipboard, Apple's Drag Manager allows data streaming, delayed delivery of data, and simultaneous transfer of multiple items (each of which can have a different data type). Tex-Edit Plus allows you to drag pictures and sounds as easily as text, or even combinations of various items.

Tex-Edit Plus can also directly create Word, Word Perfect, MacWrite, WriteNow, SimpleText and Tex-Edit Read Only documents, and America Online documents (as well as a few others). Selecting the Other option displays a dialog box allowing you to enter any 4-character creator code. You can also change an existing document's “creator” to that of another word processor so it will open in that application when double-clicked.

BBEdit Lite also allows you to save documents in a variety of other text formats, but not in the Word Processor formats that Tex-Edit Plus can handle.

Both programs have powerful, slick, and intuitive find and replace functions, which I use frequently for cleaning up non CR and LF formatting problems in email and Web text. For instance, one can quickly copy and paste (or drag) text into a Tex- Edit Plus document window temporarily to remove email reply arrows or weird line spacing form Web downloads.

Neither program has a built-in spellchecker, but third party spellcheckers like Spellswell Plus or Excalibur (freeware) or Casady & Green's Spell Catcher can be used with both text-editors.

Tex-Edit Plus can proofread your work aloud if the MacOS Speech Manager is loaded. The entire document or just specified selections can be read. You can also have Tex-Edit Plus scroll each word/sentence into view and highlight it as it is read aloud. If you have the MacOS Internet Config extension installed, you can to go to any location on the Internet by simply command-clicking on its URL from within Tex -Edit. Tex-Edit Plus can also create double-clickable sound files by using the Record Sound or Insert Sound command to insert a sound into a document. The first sound in the document is used to create the new sound file. PICT file types can be used to create picture files in documents.

So which of these programs do I like best? While my long-term familiarity with Tex-Edit Plus inclines me to stick with it, I like both of these little programs very much, and now that I've experienced BBEdit Lite, I expect that I will be using it regularly as well. I find BBEdit Lite marginally faster for creating quick text files and for jobs where Tex-Edit Plus's styled text features, advanced scripting support and other more advanced capabilities are not required, BBEdit is probably the slicker program to use, but there's really not a very significant edge.

My best advice is to try out both of these powerful little programs, which are quick downloads and involve no up-front cash commitment (none at all in the case of BBEdit Lite), and decide for yourself which suits your needs best best. Like me, you may decide to keep them both on your hard drive.

You can download the latest version of Tex-Edit Plus 2.7 from

http://www.nearside.com/trans-tex/

BBEdit Lite 4.6 is can be downloaded at:

http://web.barebones.com/free/bbedit_lite.html

Appendix 1:

Other Text-Editor Options

Of course, Tex-Edit Plus and BBEdit Lite are not the only Mac text editors available. There are a whole raft of other Mac text-editing applications, many of them shareware. I’ve tried some of these, and while most are good programs, usually with some cool and unique features, I’ve never found any of them compelling enough to entice me away from Tex-Edit Plus, and now BBEdit Lite, for everyday text editong chores.

In preparing this article I briefly checked out a demo version of BBEdit, whose interface looks very similar to that of BBEdit Lite, but which is a much more powerful program, including such bells and Whistles as a serious html editor and a built in spell-checker.

I only had time to barely scratch the surface of what BBEdit can do, and perhaps someday I'll get the time to carefully go through the 278 page PDF manual that comes with it (actually, I would prefer a book -- I hate reading manuals online).

If you're heavily into HTML (BBEdit also supports Java and Perl), BBEdit may well be the ideal text editor for you. Be forewarned, however, that BBEdit is no WYSIWYG HTML program -- this aspect of BBEdit is for source code purists only. You must preview html files in a browser.

BBEdit is commercial software and sells for $119.

Registered users of BBEdit Lite 4.6 are eligible for a cross-upgrade to BBEdit 5.1, Bare Bones's full-featured HTML and text editor, at a significant discount off the retail price. Details are available at the company's web site:

http://web.barebones.com/products/bbedit/cross.html

Nisus Writer

Nisus Software's Nisus writer word processor is also an advanced text editor for plain text, and shares with Corel's WordPerfect 3.5 the distinction of being the most powerful word-crunchers available for free.

In addition to its modestly priced ($79.95) current version of Nisus Writer (5.1.3), Nisus also offers the older but full-featured Nisus Writer 4.1.6 as a free download from their Website.

As with Bare Bones and BBEdit Lite, Nisus hopes you'll get hooked by the older version and take advantage of their upgrade path to the current Nisus Writer.

If you’re interested in what features you get in version 5.1.3 that aren’t in 4.1.6, here is Nisus’s own top ten picks:

1) A more intuitive interface (You may customize to suit your needs)

2) Impr oved footnotes

3) Save as HTML

4) Optional background color to all documents.

5) Easier Power Find Pro (find/replace, the best in the business)

6) Multiple Macro Files (automate repetitive tasks with one click)

7) Form Paragraph (easily remove extra returns from your e-mail)

8) More Keyboard Shortcuts (designed to simplify)

9) Immediate WYSIWYG Font Menu (see font names in their fonts)

10) Mac OS 8.5/8/6 compatible

If none of these is of particular interest to you, you’ll probably be just as happy with the free version. Nisus Writer 4.1.6 runs happily on both 68k and PowerPC Macs, and it's speed and low memory requirements make it a natural for older machines as well as the latest ones.

The free version is downloadable from:

http://www.nisus.com/free416

Appendix 2:

Cleaning Up Downloaded Text And Other Adventures With Tex-Edit Plus's Modify Dialog

The Modify dialog is one of Tex-Edit Plus's most cool and useful features. Mac- users are plagued by those irritating little boxes that sometimes appear at the beginning of each line of text in emails or text downloaded from the Web. These originate in the MS-DOS/Windows world, which uses different protocols for line endings.

"File transfers between Mac and non-Mac systems often result in frustration for users at both ends," says Tom Bender "The non-Mac users end up with split words and run-on paragraphs, while the Mac users are greeted by a screen full of little empty boxes and oddly wrapped lines."

MS-DOS usually uses a character-based line width. When the cursor gets to the last character position, the program inserts a CR (carriage return) and LF (linefeed character) and then carries the unfinished word down to the next line, preserving the right margin and preventing words from being split between lines.

In the Mac world, text editors and word processors dynamically “word-wrap” at the right margin and do not insert any special characters until the end of the paragraph, at which point they insert a single carriage return. When viewing non- Mac originated files on the Mac, each line may be preceded by an empty box (signifying the terminating LF character from the preceding line). In large windows, the text may not extend to the right margin, and in small windows, there is usually an odd mixture of alternating short and long lines. The Mac considers each DOS-formatted line to be a separate paragraph

Tex-Edit Plus allows you to strip the DOS CRs and LFs out of these documents by using the Strip CR/LF command to convert downloaded text to Mac-formatted word wrapping text. If this doesn't produce the desired results, you can undo the modifications and try it again with Strip leading spaces checked (above).(DOS- >Mac) or LFs->CRs (UNIX->Mac) commands to remove useless characters from the document. You can also use Tex-Edit Plus to insert these "useless" characters into Mac-created documents that are to be uploaded to a DOS-Windows computer or UNIX server or system, using the add CR/LF or CRs->LFs (Mac->UNIX) commands. UNIX systems use a single linefeed character (without a carriage return) to terminate each paragraph. This command converts all carriage returns into linefeeds.

Mac users also often notice strange character symbols and misspelled words in downloaded text, due to the Mac and MS-DOS having different protocols about using “upper” ASCII alphanumeric characters.

The ASCII convention only specifies values for the first 128 (out of 256) characters. The Macintosh uses the remaining upper range of characters to hold diacritical markings, foreign characters, typographical (curly) quotes and other characters not found on standard typewriters. Unhappily, MS-DOS uses those upper 128 characters for a completely different set of symbols.

"The Modify dialog is Tex-Edit’s most complex and powerful feature," says Tom Bender. "It allows you to globally change (munge) special characters in the text." You can either modify the whole document, or just a selection of text.

If your downloaded text is filled with “wrong” characters and misspelled words, use the Strip high ASCII characters command to delete all characters in the upper ASCII range (128-256). This option will strip many useful typographic characters (ligatures, ellipses, em dashes, curly quotes, etc.) as well as foreign language characters, so you should first convert (“stupefy”) any useful characters you wish to keep. If a lot of nonsense characters are still visible, then try Strip control characters.

Tex-Edit Plus can also normalize sentence spacing in text typed by persons who haven't unlearned the typewriter habit of following each full stop with two spaces. This option changes each instance of double space characters (following a sentence) into the typographically preferable single space when using proportional fonts.

Tex-Edit Plus's Strip diacritical marks command removes foreign language punctuation such as accents, umlauts, cedillas and the like, converting to their ordinary (English) equivalents.

Charles W. Moore

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November 21, 2008