Cool Mac Gear

I am fortunate to be the owner of a real, Victorinox Swiss Army Knife, a pocket-size tool incorporating an amazing array of screwdrivers, files, tweezers, scissors, a corkscrew, a bottle opener, a couple of implements I would have to consult the instruction sheet to remember their intended function, and of course some excellent, stainless steel knife blades that hold a razor-sharp edge. This superbly-designed and constructed tool, a gift from my wife, is a mini workshop in a handy compact unit

On the Mac OS and 0S X, my Swiss Army Knife, so to speak, is Tom Bender’s amazing shareware text editor, Tex Edit Plus, which, like my Victorinox knife, is a high-quality piece of work that does many things well. Standard text editing of course, as well as cleaning up text, file conversions, and opening almost any type of text file. However, Tex Edit Plus’s killer feature is its easy and flexible AppleScriptability, the implementation of which is unmatched by any other application in my experience.

Tex Edit Plus comes with an excellent basic selection of scripts, but for my specific needs, and I have also been able to turn Tex Edit Plus into a powerful HTML editor by adding a suite of additional AppleScripts, some recorded or written by myself; others downloaded from Doug Adams’ Tex Edit AppleScript archive site. For more on my HTML suite of scripts, see this article:
http://www.applelinks.com/mooresviews/TE+AS.shtml

Doug’s site Archive currently contains 238 diverse AppleScripts, all free to download, as well as of tips and info to help you create your own AppleScripts to use with TE+.

The WebWriting website has also posted a small suite of Tex Edit Plus AppleScripts that complement the ones of available from Doug Adams’ site.

The Web Writing Applescripts are designed to aid in the production of text for the web, to help you produce well-formed web text conforming to typographic standards, with consistent formatting and predictable rendering of text in a variety of browsers using Tex-Edit Plus.

Just download the Scripts and copy them to the Scripts subfolder inside the Tex-Edit Plus folder. For the most part you can simply write as you would in any word processor (or, indeed, paste text into Tex-Edit Plus from another program), and then run the Preflight Cruncher script to convert to HTML text.

The Scripts include:

Basic Writing Scripts

Block Quote (cmd-shift-Q) will toggle the indent of the current paragraph at the left margin. When run through the Preflight Cruncher script, indented paragraphs are wrapped in blockquote tags.

Use Georgify (cmd-shift-G) to convert your document to 17 pt Georgia with generous leading, a good setup for writing onscreen. This script also makes HTML tags small and a different colour, making reading your text a little less noisy.

URL Grabber (cmd-shift-U) quickly makes selected text into a hyperlink pointed at whatever page is loaded in the front window of your web browser.

Use URL Wrapper (cmd-shift-H) to make a hyperlink of selected text manually.

Advanced Formatting Scripts

Block Tagger (cmd-shift-B) is useful for headings and special paragraphs that don’t require paragraph tags. You need not select the entire paragraph for this to work: simply fire the script while the insertion point is in a paragraph.

Phrase Tagger (cmd-shift-T) will wrap tags around the current selected text. This is most useful for tags that format ranges of text within blocks.

List From Text (cmd-shift-L) will convert a range of paragraphs into a bulletted or numeric list.

Final Conversion

Here’s what Preflight Cruncher (cmd-shift-C) does:
• Wraps HTML tags around styled text (italic, bold, underline, etc.).
• Converts nonstandard glyphs (accented characters, analphabetic symbols and punctuation) to the coded entities more likely to render correctly in different browsers and on different operating systems.
• Wraps tags around obvious paragraphs (text followed by two carriage returns) with no existing block-level formatting tags (h1, h3, blockquote, etc.) applied.
• Assumes text followed by a single carriage return indicates a line break within a paragraph, in which case the tag is introduced.
• Wraps tags around any paragraphs indented at the left margin, i.e., those on which the Block Quote script has been run.

This article was converted to HTML with Preflight Cruncher, which is the best tool of this type among several that I've used.

Another useful tool that can be downloaded from the WebWriting website is Word HTML Cleaner, a utility that strips the proprietary Microsoft tags and artefacts from Word HTML documents, leaving basic formatting and typographic entities intact. Curled quotes and em and en dashes should come through fine, as long as they existed in the original Word document: run Autoformat to be sure.

This is intended for basic styled text documents; there is no support for rich text hoohaw like notes, sectioning, or bookmarks. Links should be fine. Fancypants tags and client-side scripts are stripped.

You can check them out at:
http://www.textism.com/resources/index.html?id=9

And thanks to reader Chris Long for pointing this resource out to me.

You can download Tex Edit Plus ($15.00 shareware) here:
http://216.25.53.29/trans-tex/index.html

Charles W. Moore

Cool Mac Gear