Doing what I do, I have deal with a lot of text on a day-to-day basis. There’s text coming from evil sources like Microsoft Word, and there’s text that just isn’t formatted right for the web. Over time I’ve become very particular about presentation (partly due to the constant visits to the well designed Apple’s product pages), and so far the only option for having it automated was using the powerful find/change tool in InDesign. After more than three years of using a Mac, I’ve only recently stumbled upon this little gem of a utility, Apimac’s Clean Text.

Clean Text helps you rapidly clean our your junk text, fix formatting issues, and do a whole bunch of other things that just make working with text easier. Apart from the “Fix All” button, which does a run through your text and fixes all the possible problems. However, you can fix very specific problems. My most used functions are fixing paragraphs, removing quote characters (those >> found in email forwards), and removing returns. When working with a program like InDesign, I have to constantly deal with people sending in documents with double returns for paragraphs, which obviously needs to be fixed. And CleanText is a much quicker solution than using InDesign’s find/replace.

I’ve also extensively used the “Convert straight quotes to smart quotes” function. While in most cases I use the keyboard shortcut, there are times when typing in speed it becomes difficult to implement the shortcut. Also knowing that Clean Text is there to back me up at the final stages is a great help.

The interface of Clean Text is extremely clean. Even all the functions sport a dimmed out grey so you get to see more of your text. Each function is labelled very clearly, so there is no confusion as to what you are clicking into.

Find/Replace
A text replace function, while not as powerful as the the one included in InDesign, features three separate find/change fields. This allows you to change multiple entries without constantly having to switch words.

Macros
I haven’t found the need to create macros, as the functions are so easy to click on. However, creating new Macros is just a matter of selecting what functions you want applied, and saving it. This would be useful to deal with if you have a lot of text coming in from a single source.

Add a bunch of Miscellaneous functions
While this doesn’t really come across as something required to cleaning text, the application can insert the date or time, show you statistics like word and character count, as well as a potentially unlimited number of undo levels.

The Verdict
Apart from it’s slightly old aqua-ish interface, Clean Text is an amazing application and I would highly recommend it to anyone working with a lot of text. A full license costs $27, while a 5-user site-license costs $37. Take the trial for a spin and I’m sure you are gonna find yourself looking at damaged text in a whole new way!