If you're a regular reader of my Mac Web scribbling, you may
recall that I've long been a big fan of Tom Bender's Tex-Edit Plus styled text editor
application, which, along with email clients and Web browsers, is
one of the core elements of my production software suite.
I use Tex-Edit for the vast majority of my text crunching tasks:
document-viewing, composition, editing, HTML markup, and data
archiving. It doesn't handle PDF or Word-formatted documents
(although it reads and writes RTF documents nicely and displays the
text of Word documents in a pinch), so I use other applications to
handle those duties - but most of the time it's Tex-Edit Plus.
The Rise and Fall of Microsoft Word for Mac
Back in the early 90s, when I first started using a Mac, word
processing was the "killer app". I started out with Microsoft Word
4, upgrading in 1993 to Word 5.1.
Word was a fine, very Mac-like application back then, and it did
a superb job. That was half a decade before Internet access arrived
in this neck of the woods (rural Nova Scotia), and I was still
mostly printing out articles and drafts as hard copy and sending
them to editors via snail mail. By the mid-90s, I had graduated to
floppy disks and fax.
When Microsoft replaced Word 5.1 with Word 6 (a.k.a. "Word
for Windows for the Mac"), I jumped ship, never to return.
Up to version 5.1, Word was pretty much the only Microsoft
application that I ever liked or indeed could stand using (and it
still works under OS X Classic Mode for are accessing my
hundreds of archived Word 5.1 formatted files), but Word 6 marked
sort of a nadir, even for Microsoft software.
After Word
At that point I switched to Nisus Writer after a brief but
unsatisfactory dalliance with Apple's MacWrite Pro. Classic
Nisus Writer was a wonderful application with more of a text
editing orientation than Word, and I used it for a couple of years,
by which time the Internet became a central part of my computing
experience virtually overnight and changed everything.
Once I was online, email became the logical and preferred means
of submitting material to editors, and I was soon posting content
to the Web myself as well. If quickly became obvious that plain
text and/or HTML were the only formatting abilities I really needed
for 95% of my output, and it dawned on me that using a
full-features word processor to produce left-justified plain ASCII
text in a single point size amounted to major overkill.
A text editor would be a more lively, responsive, and nimble
tool for what I needed to do.
Text-editors are few-frills cousins of the word-processor,
lacking heavy-duty formatting capabilities and the ponderous
inventory of features one finds in MS Word and various other word
processors. No style sheets, no on-the-fly spell checking (and in
many instances, no built-in spell checking at all), no mail merge,
no headers and footers, no footnotes or endnotes, no thesaurus, and
no desktop publishing pretensions.
Text-editors are designed to handle plain text without a lot of
distractions.
Enter Tex-Edit
I can't recall exactly how Tex-Edit first I arrived on my hard
drive. Perhaps on a compilation CD of Mac shareware. Anyway, it had
been there since the early or mid-90s, and I had experimented with
it a bit.
Now, taking a closer look, I realized that Tex-Edit, which had
grown into Tex-Edit Plus, would do just about everything I needed a
word processor to do, including (with the help of AppleScripts)
HTML conversion and markup. I switched to TE+ almost entirely
around the end of 1998 and have never looked back or even been
seriously tempted to use anything else since.
Tex-Edit Plus is small, fast, easy-to-use, requires little
memory, and has a clean, uncluttered interface - not that there is
any shortage of other good text editors. Apple bundles a very
decent one with OS X: TextEdit, and BareBones Software makes a
couple of superb ones - the powerful BBEdit much beloved
of serious Web authors, and TextWrangler,
which is also amazingly powerful and capable for a freeware
application. There are many others.
The Sweet Spot
However, none has managed to hit the sweet spot with me that
Tex-Edit Plus does.
The two key elements are that TE+ is a styled text
editor, which means that it supports a pretty comprehensive range
of document formatting if you need it, including embedded graphics
and even movies, and secondly, its implementation of AppleScript is
the best I've encountered in any application - period.
AppleScript, for those not familiar with it, is Apple's
English-like programming language that allows you to use Apple
Events to control applications,and Tex-Edit is the slickest and
best at this of any program I've ever used. As TE+ developer Tom
Bender puts it: "AppleScript puts the power of these Apple Events
in the hands of the ordinary user. It's just another insanely great
advantage that we Mac users enjoy."
Classic and OS X Versions
Another point that may be of particular interest to readers of
Low End Mac is that classic Tex-Edit Plus, which is still
available, is transparently compatible with Tex-Edit Plus X. I
still use both, often in tandem, with one old one running natively
and the other in Classic Mode. Particularly on my older machines
like my Pismo and G3 iBook, I find that TE+ running in
Classic Mode is much more lively and responsive than the OS X
version.
The Classic version has fewer features, but it works exactly the
same as Tex-Edit Plus X: The same suite of AppleScripts can be
utilized, and documents are identical.
The Classic version of TE+ is one of the greatest Mac
applications of all time, and the OS X version is even better,
retaining all the goodness of its predecessor and adding some cool
new stuff like the ability to support the built in OS X spell
check (the lack of spell checking being perhaps the biggest
shortcoming of the Classic application). There is also a new
floating tool palette that can be displayed or hidden with a
keystroke. Files created with either the OS X or the Classic
versions of are fully forward and backward compatible. (TE+ is so
far only PowerPC native, but it's so fast that performance under
Rosetta will be more than acceptable on Intel-based Macs).
Scripting Tex-Edit
Tex-Edit Plus is one reason why I thank myself every day for
choosing a Mac, and AppleScript is another. Tex-Edit Plus's
AppleScript configuration could hardly be smoother or more
user-friendly. Scripts, which are sort of mini-applets or macros
that automate a particular function. (Actually they're far more
than macros - Apple Events allow "scriptable" applications to
communicate at a very intimate level. Unlike macros, Apple Events
bypass the user interface and are exceptionally efficient.
Scriptability implies that the programmer has given AppleScript
access to major portions of the application's inner workings.)
These scripts are stored in a folder called "Scripts" in the
Tex-Edit Plus application folder and appear in an AppleScript menu
when Tex-Edit is running. When you add new scripts to the folder,
they show up in the menu instantly without your having to restart
the program.
To run a script, you just open the menu and click on a selected
script title or use the optional floating Script Tools palette.
Compiled scripts added to the new "Script Tools" folder will show
up as buttons in the palette. Just option-click a button to edit
its script.
Even better, for scripts that you really use a lot, it's more
convenient to assign keystroke shortcuts to activate them, which is
done by simply appending an underscore-character suffix to the
script's name. ("ScriptName_0") or, for a function key shortcut,
append underscore-Fkey ("ScriptName_F5").
You can also configure various modifier keys in your keyboard
shortcuts. For example, with the script Mac -> HTML_F6, press
the F6 key, and a copy of your document gets converted to HTML
while you watch. I have several frequently used scripts, such as
HTML markup functions and things like capitalization/toggling
consigned F-Key shortcuts, which I find speeds things up
immensely.
And of course, AppleScript can be employed to do many more
things in Tex-Edit Plus than HTML markup. Almost any repetitive
task you do can probably be AppleScripted. Style sheets are a good
example.
A couple of dozen or so AppleScripts are bundled with the
Tex-Edit Plus standard download, and because Tex-Edit Plus is
recordable, you can record custom scripts of your own to automate
tedious or frequently repeated tasks using the Apple Script Editor
utility that is included with the Mac OS. Or visit Doug Adams'
Tex-Edit Plus
AppleScripts Website where you can download dozens of
prewritten scripts.
Working with Non-Mac Files
One of Tex-Edit's coolest functions is its facility for
stripping DOS linefeeds and carriage-returns from text downloaded
from the Web. I also use it as a quick viewer for reading
downloaded text files, for editing text (of course), and as a
minimalist HTML editor.
In the Mac world, text editors and word processors dynamically
"word-wrap" at the right margin and don't insert any special
characters until the end of the paragraph, at which point they
insert a single carriage return. When viewing non-Mac originated
files on the Mac, each line may be preceded by an empty box
(signifying the terminating linefeed [LF] character from the
preceding line). In large windows, the text may not extend to the
right margin, and in small windows, there is usually an odd mixture
of alternating short and long lines.
The Mac considers each DOS-formatted line to be a separate
paragraph
Tex-Edit Plus allows you to strip the DOS CRs and LFs out of
these documents by using the Strip CR/LF command to convert
downloaded text to Mac-formatted word wrapping text. If this
doesn't produce the desired results, you can undo the modification
and try it again with Strip leading spaces checked (above). (DOS
-> Mac) or LFs -> CRs (Unix -> Mac) commands to remove
useless characters from the document. You can also use Tex-Edit
Plus to insert these "useless" characters into Mac-created
documents that are to be uploaded to a DOS-Windows computer or Unix
server or system, using the add CR/LF or CRs -> LFs (Mac ->
Unix) commands. Unix systems use a single linefeed character
(without a carriage return) to terminate each paragraph. This
command converts all carriage returns into linefeeds.
High ASCII Issues
Mac users often notice strange character symbols and misspelled
words in downloaded text, due to the Mac and MS-DOS having
different protocols about using "upper" ASCII alphanumeric
characters. The ASCII convention only specifies values for the
first 128 (out of 256) characters. The Macintosh uses the remaining
upper range of characters to hold diacritical markings, foreign
characters, typographical (curly) quotes, and other characters not
found on standard typewriters. Unhappily, MS-DOS uses those upper
128 characters for a completely different set of symbols.
"The Modify dialog is Tex-Edit's most complex and powerful
feature," says Tom Bender. "It allows you to globally change
(munge) special characters in the text." You can either modify the
whole document, or just a selection of text.
If your downloaded text is filled with "wrong" characters and
misspelled words, use the Strip High ASCII Characters command to
delete all characters in the upper ASCII range (128-256). This
option will strip many useful typographic characters (ligatures,
ellipses, em dashes, curly quotes, etc.) as well as foreign
language characters, so you should first convert ("stupefy") any
useful characters you wish to keep.
If a lot of nonsense characters are still visible, then try
Strip Control Characters.
Other Cleanup
Tex-Edit Plus can also normalize sentence spacing in text typed
by persons who haven't unlearned the typewriter habit of following
each full stop with two spaces. This option changes each instance
of double space characters (following a sentence) into the
typographically preferable single space when using proportional
fonts.
Tex-Edit Plus's Strip Diacritical Marks command removes foreign
language punctuation, such as accents, umlauts, cedillas, and the
like, converting to their ordinary (English) equivalents.
The Tex-Edit Story
Tom Bender started programming on an Apple II+ in 1981, creating
games for his wife and friends. "They were similar to the famous Scott Adams
tales," he says, "but with a different subject matter."
"I ran across a book of BASIC computer games put out by
Creative Computing," he continues, "which contained a cool,
one-page 'Eliza'
demo for the Apple II. I implemented a greatly expanded version on
my Apple and then moved it to the IBM PC at work, and finally to my
128K Mac.
"The whole Eliza concept suggests a word processor, so I set
about creating a suitable environment in which to converse with my
digital companion. The resulting Eliza had some rather good munge
capabilities, so people started asking me to create a real text
editor." Thus Tex-Edit was born.
Since then, Tom's objective has been to add to Tex-Edit's
capabilities without slowing it down or bloating it up. He has been
reasonably successful in that quest.
Tom says that a large portion of Tex-Edit Plus' feature set is
user-inspired. "The quality of suggestions and feedback that I get
from 'ordinary users' is amazing. This kind of thing may not show
up on market share reports, but I'll take quality over quantity
any time.
About Tex-Edit
Tex-Edit documents normally consist of two portions ("forks").
The data portion of the file is plain, unadorned ASCII text and can
be opened easily by any word processor. The character styles and
paragraph formatting are stored in a separate resource fork that is
ignored by other word processors.
To save a document so that character styles are recognized by
other word processors, first finish editing the document. Then
choose "File -> Save As... -> File Type: RTF". RTF is a
standard styled text format that can be read by nearly all word
processors, including Tex-Edit.
Tex-Edit Plus General Features
Tex-Edit Plus offers many useful and powerful capabilities:
- Create, edit, view and print any text (ASCII or Unicode)
document.
- Create, edit, view and print RTF documents.
- Create, view and print SimpleText read-only documents.
- Powerful search and replace (grep) facilities.
- View, copy and print PICT documents.
- Play QuickTime and QuickTime VR movies.
- Clean up e-mail to and from non-Mac systems.
- Easily decode or insert any ASCII character.
- Unlimited file size.
- Apple Event support with full scriptability.
- Recordable.
- Word Services support.
- Document handling of embedded sounds, movies, and
pictures.
- Individual paragraph formatting.
- Line spacing, justification, paragraph spacing, indents,
etc.
- Underline paragraphs.
- Super/subscript support.
- Block quoting support.
- Full support for styled text.
- Unlimited undo and redo, even for global operations.
- Multiple document support.
- Selectable soft word wrapping.
- Extensive Speech Manager support.
- Support for Drag and Drop.
- Support for Text Services Manager and inline input.
- Adjustable tab spacing.
- Smart quotes.
- Stationery aware.
- Simple hypertext document support.
- Extended keyboard support.
With Tex-Edit Plus you can:
- Quickly create, edit and print styled text documents of any
size (limited by RAM).
- Use powerful regular expression search and replace
functions.
- View and print TeachText or SimpleText read-only ("ReadMe")
documents.
- Play QuickTime movies:
- Insert attention-getting sound annotations to spice up ordinary
interoffice mail
- Easily create TeachText/SimpleText read-only documents,
including embedded pictures.
- Read and create RTF files.
- Read and create UTF-16 (Unicode) text files.
- View and print color PICT files, such as those produced by draw
programs or Apple's built-in screen snapshot utility.
- Copy a selection from a PICT file, cropping the image for use
in the company newsletter.
- View, edit and print text documents created by virtually any
word processor or computer.
- Reformat downloaded e-mail or text, correcting word-wrap
problems and removing extraneous, non-Mac characters.
- Prepare text for upload to the Internet, so that people with
Wintel or Unix systems can view the document as it was intended to
be viewed.
- Instantly quote a brief passage from received e-mail, allowing
the sender to remember their original message.
- Read any text document aloud. (Listen to a SimpleText read-only
file, for example, as the text and pictures scroll by!)
- Quickly optimize a document for printing, replacing generic,
typewriter-era characters with professional-looking typographically
correct text.
- Create simple hypertext documents.
Tex-Edit Plus is $15 shareware, and you can download it and try
it out for free to see if it does what you need it to do.
System requirements:
- Tex-Edit Plus X: Mac OS X 10.1 or higher
- Tex-Edit Plus: Mac System 7.1 or higher
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