Two utilities to help with text

Written by Admin on Sunday, September 7th, 2008

APP SHOT

Two utilities to help with text

The well-named tinySpell can check your typing on the fly, asking if that is really the word you wanted.

Here are a couple of small but potentially useful utilities for people who spend time doing text and words on a computer, which apparently means most of us.

PureText is a lovely little (13KB) standalone program I put into my StartUp folder a long time ago. It intercepts everything copied to the clipboard and lets you paste it to another program without any formatting. Microsoft Word (say) and many email users know the frustration of copying a headline and three paragraphs from a web page and pasting it with Ctrl-V, only to spend inordinate minutes re-formatting it all in their current document format.

With PureText, you press Win-V (configurable) and it copies as, well, pure text, without the original formatting.

Then there is tinySpell, which in several ways lives up to its name, and not only for its 584KB download size.

This is a total, all-in-one spelling program, which can check anything you write in various ways, no matter what program you use to write it in.

The two most common spell-checking options are “on the fly,” where tinySpell checks each word as you type, and instantly offers corrections - and all in one, where you copy a chunk of text to the clipboard and let tinySpell go through it for you. The second option is actually slower because it only checks a word at a time, stopping on the wrong or unrecognised ones.

This program also comes with a couple of useful hot-keys turned on for quick use for a replacement list and a beep for example. They are changeable.

Find PureText at http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext, while tinySpell free version is at http://www.tinyspell.m6.net.

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