Services: Cleaning Up Ugly Text with WordService

February 24th, 2008 at 2:00 PM - Tips by Jeff Gamet

Iive mentioned the unsung power of the Services menu in Mac OS X before -- most recently to show off the Send Selection Service for Mail. While that Service makes it easy to send text to someone else, thereis another that makes it amazingly easy to clean up text selections, reformat text, change change capitalization, and more.

Iim talking about WordService from Devon Technologies. Youill need to download and install this free Service yourself before you can take advantage of its reformatting and editing goodness. Hereis how:

• Download WordService from the Devon Technologies Web site.
• Expand the WordService archive and install the Service file. It goes in <your Home directory>/Library/Services.
• Log out and re-login to enable the Service.

Once installed and active, youill get 34 extra functions you can use to perform tasks like removing line endings, multiple spaces, and quotes; change text to all upper or lower case; and change the first letter in sentences to upper case. It also lets you sort lines in ascending or descending order; change quotes to straight or smart; insert the date, time, or path to a file; get document statistics; and more.

I use WordService to regularly to strip out extra spaces in documents I am editing. Since many life-long typewriter users find it difficult to break the double-space between sentences habit, itis much easier for me to simply remove the extra spaces when editing than to put them through the frustration of self-retraining their typing habits.

The other features WordService adds are great, too, and the price canit be beat.

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