What’s New in TextSoap 8
General
- Requires macOS 10.10 (Yosemite) or later
If you are coming from a previous version of TextSoap, here is a quick rundown of some of the changes you may notice. We’re always working to improve the experience.
New User Experience
The focus was on content over “chrome” (extraneous UI elements). The idea is reduce the elements that may distract from the content you’re working on, whether it is the text in the text editor or actions in the custom cleaner editor.
Toolbar
- Toolbar provide quick access to MyScrub, Copy All, Paste and the new Paste Over feature.
- MyScrub is now a shortcut to SCRUB or your owner cleaner. See below.
- Copy All will select all the text and copy it to the clipboard
- Paste is the standard Paste
- Paste Over will replace all your text with the contents of the clipboard
- Custom Cleaners & Groups brings up custom cleaner/groups window.
Text Editor Improvements
Show line numbers. You can display line numbers for both plain text and rich text. Note: in this situation, line is synonymous with paragraph.
Highlight current line. You can now optionally highlight the line that the cursor is on. Will also highlight the lines of a selection.
Wrap text to window/Unwrap text. Text wrapping to the window is the default behavior, but you can now unwrap the text. This is useful when working with some types of text data.
Word count has been redesigned. Definitions of characters, words, paragraphs have been updated for more consistent results. Performance has been improved for very large documents.
Sidebar
Search in cleaner lists. When you search in cleaner lists, you will first see all the matches in your current group, and then any matches that are available in the entire library. Changing to Library is no longer necessary.
Find and replace now has syntax coloring for special characters in textual mode (i.e. \t, \n) and metacharacters for regular expressions. It’s now much easier to spot any errors in your expression. Try it yourself by typing an “(” your other text and a “)” to mark the capture group or with a property like \p{UppercaseLetter} or [:Lu:] .
Live preview now allow for real time matching, replacing Regex Lab. The text matches are automatically shown as you type in your expression (once it is valid).
Match details (#) allows you to see the specific capture groups of a regular expression. Display the capture groups for each match allowing you to see the exact details on each match.
Custom Cleaners and Groups Navigator Window
Custom Cleaners and Groups Navigator provides a single access point to many of the features of TextSoap 8. You have access to
- Editable custom cleaners
- Editable custom groups
The Navigator also provides a means to add, remove, import and export both cleaners and groups.
Double-click the cleaner or group to open the editor for it.
Libraries
Sometimes you want to import or export a collection of cleaners or groups. When exporting, selecting the Library option will allow multiple cleaners to be stored in a single library. Import supports both single cleaners and libraries.
Custom Cleaner Editor
The Custom Cleaner Editor was rewritten.
Each cleaner editor now has its own window.
The new hierarchical actions allow you to easily hide embedded actions. Some actions can contain other cleaners within them (conditionals, group, macro, etc).
New Group action allows you take advantage of the new hierarchal action feature. You can use it to organize actions. Disabling a parent group action will prevent any items contained from being performed. Now quickly enable/disable a collection of actions with a single step.
Cleaner actions are now color-coded, giving a broad overview of a cleaner with just a glance. Quickly spot conditionals (If Text), styling actions, notes, and cleaner specific (macros, workflow) just by using their color.
Customize title feature allows you to change the title of an action. You can append text to the title or completely replace the title as needed.
Syntax highlighting makes it easier to work with regular expressions (\d+) or the special characters (i.e. \t, \n,) in find and replace actions.
Lists Editor. Each cleaner now has a global data table to store or more sets of tabular data. Acting is a mini-database, the new data editor allows you to editing, find/replacing, and grouping across larger data sets.
“Bulk Find and Replace Text” action is now called “Batch Find and Replace Text” and uses the new global data table. Batch Find & Replace can operate on an entire table of data, or just a sub group, as needed.
Find Text and Associate URL has been renamed to “Create Hyperlink URLs” and also uses the new global data table.
Macros. Macros is more straight forward replacement of subroutines. Instead of repeatedly inserting the same actions, you can define a macro and apply it throughout the cleaner. Macros are encompassed in a single Macro Definitions group to make it easy to tuck away.
A new Copy Text to Clipboard action will copy text in the midst of a cleaner.
Custom Group Editor
The Custom Group Editor has also been rewritten. The focus with the new editor is to allow more direct editing of group elements.
New Cleaners
Along with the variety new interface improvements, we’ve added new built-in cleaners. Many of these are based on requests from customers.
Capitalize Lines - the cleaner traverses the lines of the provided text and capitalizes the first letter of each line. Examples where this would be useful: lists or song lyrics.
- Fix Jammed Words - Using the spell checker, the cleaner will attempt to find words jammed together that simply need a space between them and fixes them.
Example: “Please changethis item” becomes “Please change this item”.
Note: This cleaner will only fix a “jammed word” if it finds a suggestion with the only difference being the missing space.
- Reverse All Characters - Reverses all the characters of the provided text.
- Example: “This is fun” becomes “nuf si sihT”.
- Reverse Word Order - Reverses the word order of the provided text. It does not change the characters within the word.
- Example: “This is fun” becomes “fun is This”.
- Reverse Characters in Each Word - Reverses the characters of each word of the provided text. The word order remains the same.
- Example: “This is fun” becomes “sihT si nuf”.
Word Count - Notification - uses OS X User Notification to display word count of selected text.
Word Count - Remove All Notifications - removes all TextSoap word count notifications.
Strip Diacritic Marks - strip off any diacritic marks from text. ü becomes u, é becomes e, etc.
Make Unicode Names - convert unicode characters to their unicode name. 😀 becomes \N{GRINNING FACE}.
- Additional cleaners added to normalize dates in the more common formats.
- Normalize Dates to MM-DD-YYYY Format cleaner.
- Normalize Dates to DD-MM-YYYY Format cleaner.
- Normalize Dates to YYYY-MM-DD Format cleaner.
Misc
- New Dates Group with date related cleaners.
MyScrub
The MyScrub editor has been replaces with a MyScrub preference. To create custom behavior, create a custom cleaner and select that cleaner in preferences. To change which custom cleaner to use, go to Preferences > General.
Suggestion: Name your custom cleaner 'Customized Scrub' to easily identify it. As a bonus, you can now use any custom cleaner actions (find & replace, etc) with this approach.