Clean Text 5.0 — It does what it says and the greatest of ease

Reviewed by Harry {doc} Babad - © 2007

Introduction Including Publisher’s Summary

I’ve been using Selznick Scientific’s SmartWrap 2.7.3 [$18] for cleaning up stuff filled Eudora emails. I also have a more universal version of 2.7.3 [$18] installed that works on some oddly structured documents I receive from well-meaning peecee users. The more universal version works via a paste to my clipboard but also support a large number of both text editing and email programs - http://www.selznick.com/products/smartwrap/mac/index.htm/

After having lived with SmartWrap for many years, I was eager to try a new text cleaning application. The product appeared, based on the MacUpdate description, more broadly useful. It was also a new toy to play with, but who would challenge that.

Apimac Clean Text is a tool dedicated to webmasters, graphic designers and magazine editors to reduce text cleanup time. Clean Text for the Mac eliminates all text formatting preparing it for pasting or printing. It performs other useful functions, such as removing empty lines, removing unwanted spaces, removing tab characters, converting smart quotes, tabs, returns, and more. (I wonder if programmers would benefit from the application?)

Clean Text is an extremely useful tool when you have to paste some text copied from one document or application into another. This is especially true, when you want the text to get the attributes (such as color, font, dimension and style) of the new document instead of preserving the attributes copied from the old one. You will not need this application with MS Word, which comes with the attribute saving capability find/replace built in.

As its publisher notes “often you have to paste some text copied from one document or application into another, and you want the text to get the attributes (such as color, font, dimension and style) of the new document instead of preserving the attributes copied from the old one. Clean Text for Mac eliminates all text formatting, preparing it for pasting. Moreover, the application performs other useful functions, such as removing empty lines, removing multiple spaces, removing tab characters etc. It's also very useful for printing out text without wasting ink and paper on extra “pages”, as often happens when you print directly from a Web browser.

Getting Started Using the Software

No complex installation procedures, or tuning of complex preferences. It works after I installed it my application folder from the downloaded .dmg file. I neither had to read the simple directions in the Read-me file nor the 3-page (help) Manual. Just like any well-crafted Macintosh program, install it and use it. One thing that worked was not mentioned in the documentation. I could drop and drag a document, for cleanup, to the applications’ icon in the dock. Good, one less set of clicks.

I had a lot of fun with the replace feature; it’s almost as flexible as the one in MS Word. I used it to clean out redundant information in email messages. You know multiple copies of contact information and those annoying AOL tags.

Help or No Help — The brief downloaded help file was very limited. It only contained “Create a preset” and a Trouble shooting” assistance guide. (The downloaded document was identical to the information in the “help” file I accessed from the application menu.)

What I Did — I had a number of weirdly formatted email messages and a few rich test formatted documents that were full of garbage. So I tested them.

I found, the brand new Quick Clean action, let me solve with a single click the most common cleaning problems for text found in email messages, strangely text coded documents and web pages. After cleanup, then I could further reduce clutter with the replace feature.

I actually played briefly with both the Quick Clean and a few of the individual filter actions, but could find no especial reason, at least for now, to specify anything but the former.

The software is flexible and intuitive. You can use the filters one at a time or group them to work in parallel. That for some could be a great convenience. You can, I noted, save the filters you used as a custom preset, so that you can rerun it again later. However, with the limited test samples I had available, the Clean Text mode did almost everything I needed. (More on the one exception, below, in the discomforts section.)

Discomforts

Definition of the Software Filters’ Functions —Many of the functions (what they did) were obvious from their name but not all. Alas, the brief Help-Manual I downo0aded did not help. I would have welcomed a glossary an actual definition of the function of different filters, with an example. Unfortunately, I am not of the school of if the developer wanted me to use a function, he would have explained it.

I thrive on glossaries and tutorials. Indeed I was troubled by the lack of explanation of the difference between paste and paste over, or how copy all differed from both of those.

However, with the limited set of test samples, I could not explicitly determine the differences. I’m not a great believer of things being intuitively obvious.

An Unforeseen Limitation to the Product — Although the product, base on limited testing, does everything it claims to, I am greedy and unhappy. But First: why limited testing, I don’t keep text formatted gibberish containing content on my hard drive, but immediately clean up with the Selznick product. I had to await some “chain” emails full of layered quotes (layered forward messages) before I could test Clean Text. One came just in time, and of course I cleaned it up, ASAP. I like the developer’s example so I’m using it as an illustration.

I’m unhappy because I need some tool that that kills the following types of intruding garbage. I had to find the secrete message by selecting each set of intruding items and using MS word Find/Replace feature, delete them. (e.g., <SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: black">)

Conclusion

Overall impression of the product – good and bad points... Don’t forget to include support issues if you experienced any during your evaluation of the product. The products differ on whether you need to use one filter (cleanup facet) at a time or are able to group them for a particular task.

Recommendation

There are a number of products that serve, to various degrees of detail, the same overall function as Clean Text. These include the Selznick product for Eudora [$18], and Text Soap 5.5.3, http://www.unmarked.com/textsoap/ a $30 product.

Other than the lack of a glossary of terms, I am quite happy with Clean Text, and would buy it because it is a more powerful and flexible tool then is SmartWrap.