[Nick's Writing Blog] Five Free Online Text-Formatting Tools

4 views

Skip to first unread message

Nick

unread,

Sep 21, 2010, 2:00:06 PM9/21/10

to my-writ...@googlegroups.com

I don't know about you, but in the course of my writing and editing work I regularly copy text from one platform to another - email, Microsoft Word, PDFs, assorted websites, and so on.

Formatting is frequently a casualty in this process. So I thought today I'd share a few free online tools I've found useful for manipulating text and generally reducing the time I spend correcting formatting problems.

One task I often have to perform is copy text that has been created in Microsoft Word to a format suitable for publishing online. As you may know, Word includes a variety of characters that don't normally display well online - smart (curly) quotes, long dashes, ellipses, and so on.

I was therefore pleased to discover this online tool to replace smart quotes with regular straight quotes. As far as I can tell, it comes from a website owned by a guy called Dan Hersam. Anyway, I've been using it a lot recently, so thanks, Dan!

As well as stripping out smart quotes (single and double) and replacing them with straight ones, this web-based tool converts Word dashes to the plain text version. The developer says it also changes other Word characters to standard ones. That may be so (I haven't had occasion to test this yet) - but even if the above was all that it did, I'd still find it extremely useful. It's great for formatting guest posts that have been written in Word so that they display properly on my blog, for example.

Another, similar tool is this one from Hochman Consultants. I slightly prefer Dan Hersam's application, but both work extremely well. Check them both out if you ever need this type of assistance with formatting.

Another task I often face is stripping unwanted line breaks from text. This can happen when you're copying text from an email or a website. I've found this tool from the excellent Text Fixer website perfect for this. Just paste your text in the upper box and choose Remove Line Breaks Only or Remove Line Breaks and Paragraph Breaks. Click on the Remove Line Breaks button and the text will be copied to the lower box with all those superfluous line breaks removed. This is another tool I use quite regularly.

Another resource I like from Text Fixer is their Remove Whitespaces Tool. This is handy if you're editing text where someone has put in double spaces after full stops (I know typists were taught to do this for many years, and may still be, but it's not required with modern electronic publishing systems). Just paste the text in to the top box and choose what you want it to do with tabs (delete them or replace them with a single space as well). Simple, but very useful.

Finally, I was going to mention the Zubrag.com HTML tag stripper (oh look, I just have), but when I checked just now this service was unavailable. Still, if and when it returns, this is another very useful tool, for those times you want to strip all the HTML tags from a piece of text to leave the words and nothing else.

So those are some free online tools I personally find useful in my day-to-day work. Are there any similar resources you know and recommend? Please do post them as comments below!