Tidy Up Quotes

At last a temporary relief from more things Microsoft.

The world at large is slowly catching on: once upon a time no one could understand why anyone would want to wrap plain text, much less how to do it. Archaic dinosaurs like BBEdit still have features to insert 'soft line breaks' and 'hard line breaks' and who knows what.

It's all irrelevant today. Text just wraps to fill its container. And it's still 100% 'plain text'. Things couldn't be easier.

Except for notorious Microsoft mail clients. And their Exchange server which will ruin anything it breathes on. And a number of webmail providers that lag behind. And a few tools given the nod by RMS and put in Linux distros. And taken as a whole they still create havoc.

Or how about text as seen in the illustration below? When's the last time you got a joke forwarded to you through five hundred other accounts? With gobs of broken lines and other assorted gibberish?

Before and after: typically chaotic text is straightened out with a single keyboard shortcut - even in Yahoo! Mail.

What's your gut reaction when you see this? It's probably 'just delete it'. It's not worth it: trying to make sense of it all, trying to tidy it up, is just too daunting and time consuming a task.

Until now that is.

ACP Services

The ACP Services work on top of your applications and web forms. If you want to tidy up a quote as in the illustration above, you don't have to copy text out to doctor it - you doctor it right in place and with a single keyboard shortcut (⌘").

Relief from yet another annoyance Copyright © Microsoft Corporation.

Here's the full list of ACP text services.

Camel

See Wikipedia if you need an explanation: 'camel case' is a way of capitalising and then concatenating text.

Capitals

Capitalises text anywhere you have it.

HTML 4.0

Transforms your text into W3C compatible source for the World Wide Web.

Lower Case

Transforms your text into lower case - this includes anything in any character set, from Hebrew to Arabic to oriental languages - anything.

Single Spaces

Eliminates both horizontal and vertical extraneous white space.

Standard Quotes

Replaces 'pretty' quotes with W3C conformant quotes. [Note: if you really want pretty quotes, use the ACP 'HTML 4.0' service mentioned above - otherwise use this, as your website won't otherwise look good.]

Strip HTML Tags

Does what it says. You will most likely want to clean white space afterwards with Rixedit.

Tidy Up Quote

A boon if there ever is one. Available in BBEdit for $199 but here for a fraction of a fraction. Take care of all that confused, kludged mail you get from MS mail clients and webmail providers that are sluggish in 'getting with it'. Take out the indents, the broken lines, the extraneous white space - and all at the hit of a keyboard shortcut, and do it anywhere - in your mail client, a web form - anywhere.

Undo Escapes

Undoes the 'escapes' in URLs. Special characters in URLs have to be 'escaped' with a two digit hexadecimal number. Mailing or posting such URLs won't work: the escapes have to be 'undone'.

Any body of text can be selected, even an entire mail message - only the escapes are changed.

Upper Case

Transforms your text into upper case - this includes anything in any character set, from Hebrew to Arabic to Chinese to who knows / who cares: if it's got upper and lower case, this service will do it.

The ACP Service Managers

The ACP Services come with two service menu configuration utilities: ACP Service Manager and ACP Service Manager Pro. With these two applications you control not only what the ACP Services put on your Services menu, but what everyone else does as well.

See Also
ACP Services
ACP Web Services
ACP Service Browser
ACP Service Manager
ACP Service Manager Pro