Hands on: TextSoap 8 cleans up your text for online and publishers

From 1998 to around 2004, every website editor at BBC Worldwide in the UK had an extra button in their copy of Microsoft Word. When you clicked it, Word would ready your text to go into websites without any of the usual problems of the time. Smart quotes, the 66 and 99 marks, used to break the sites, for instance, so they were changed to plain ones. The BBC system had problems with dashes and certain types of parentheses too, plus a constant difficulty with the British pound symbol.

This Word button handled four or five such common issues but it was the quote marks it was known for. So much so that since it was changing smart quotes into dumb ones, it could've been called the Dumber. Instead, since "thick" is British slang for stupid, it was called Thickify. It made smart things more thick.

I know all this because I wrote Thickify. It was the single most successful piece of work I ever did at the BBC and hardly anyone who used it had any idea that it was mine or that it was a Word macro. They believed that it was part of Microsoft Word and when they'd upgrade that word processor, they would actually shout at IT people for apparently removing their big button.

A dozen BBC websites used it. Probably twenty editors, news editors or assistant editors used it. So did most of the writers on each of these sites. To this day I am proud of that work — and yet I see it was total rubbish compared to TextSoap 8.4.7.

TextSoap is the same idea and it does the same things. However, where my Thickify for BBC fixed four or five problems, TextSoap 8 does more than a hundred.

Paste some text into this Mac app and it will remove extra spaces, it will take out extra returns, it can remove every tab and so on. If you paste in the HTML source code from a web page, it will extract all the actual text from it.

Better and better

You don't have to paste text into the app, though. Instead, you can call up TextSoap's features from within practically any Mac app. Just select some text then click on the app's name in the menu bar. Choose the little-used Services item from the menu that drops down and then TextSoap does its work.

In the background, it's taking that selected text and putting it into its own app before cleaning it up and pasting it back.

It puts that text into its Clipboard Workspace but it's also possible to open or create documents in TextSoap. It's oddly resistant to closing them again, though.

We'd run it from the Services menu a few times and would sometimes find that it had opened new documents for each occasion. So we'd close them but the next time we'd run TextSoap, it would occasionally reopen a dozen. It's probably something to do with macOS's way of making apps reopen the last documents you were working on, but still we had positively chosen to close them.

When we'd run it from within another app like Pages or Word or Ulysses, though, we wouldn't notice the documents at all because we stay in that app as it works.

Still, there's a reason that macOS Services menu is so little used. You forget that it's there and also to choose it you have to take your hands off the keyboard and use the mouse or trackpad. Since we're doing this to speed up preparing text that we've typed, it would be great if you could just use a keyboard shortcut — and you can.

At the foot of the Services menu there is Services Preferences option. Choose that and you're taken to the right section of System Preferences. It's the Keyboard pane and Shortcuts/Services will already be highlighted.

If you've not been in this before or haven't looked at Services on the Mac, your head will jerk back at the sheer number of options. Every app you've ever installed can provide a Service and so many do that your list is going to be long.

However, scroll on down and you will reach one called Clean with TextSoap 8. It will also say "none" next to it. Click on that to record a new keystroke that will open the Service for you.

After that, using TextSoap is a matter of selecting some text, pressing that button and taking your hands off the keyboard while it works. Depending on how much text you've selected, you may have to wait a while but it's going to be enough time to flex your fingers, not enough time to get a coffee.

Takes all sorts

Perhaps it's just because we are more habitually used to clicking on menubar items, we use Services only when we remember. The rest of the time, we click on TextSoap's menubar app.

This does also have the advantage that where Services shows you only one or two TextSoap cleaners, the menubar app lists about 20 by default. So we can go directly to Straighten Quotes if we know that's all we want.

There is more, though

If this all you use TextSoap for then you're in good company: this is chiefly how we've used it for years.

However, it is preposterously more powerful and has practically a ludicrous number of options that we've explored from time to time.

They're all to do with creating what TextSoap calls your own cleaners. The built-in option that straightens or thickifies smart quotes is a cleaner. The one that removes double spaces after a sentence is another.

While most of the time you'll use one called Scrub which is actually a collection of many routines, each time you run TextSoap you are choosing a cleaner to work on your selected text.

It's just that you can make your own. You have to open the main app, you can't do this from the menubar version. Choose File, New, Custom Cleaner.

This gets you an editor window that's divided into three key areas. Down the left there is a list of actions or existing cleaners that you can use. Each one comes with a detailed explanation of what it does and the only reason you'll take a long time to get through this is that there are so many.

Then the greater part of the editor window has two sections arranged horizontally. At the top there is a Properties window and then underneath is an Actions one.

Or that's the theory. We spent a frustratingly long time trying to understand how this section worked because we didn't have that Actions part. It turned out that this was because we also didn't have the very latest version of the software: while TextSoap has had this particular feature for some years, it somehow wasn't displaying in our copy. Not until we updated.

When we did, this suddenly because much more familiar territory. If you've ever used Workflow, Automator or Keyboard Maestro then you'll recognize the idea. You have a pot of actions to choose from and you drag in the ones you want into the order you want them to work.

Then you can edit them to make an action be more specific.

For instance, we created a cleaner called The Ize Have It where words written with the British English ending -ise were changed to the US English -ize.

We dragged in a Find and Replace action, then entered a pair of words like "equalise" and "equalize" and from now on this cleaner will make that swap. It was a bit tedious because we had to do a different Find and Replace for each pair of words. It would be better if you could load in a spreadsheet of them.

Still, no matter how many pairs of words we add, we're adding them to one cleaner. Which means, every time we want to check and fix this problem, we run that and it's done.

Worth the effort

TextSoap is worth putting some effort in to create your own cleaners because the time you spend now is saved later. You do it once and this tool is available forever.

It could be friendlier but really for the giant majority of times we use it, TextSoap is quite clear. We'd just like it to have some up to date documentation for those times we want to go further.

TextSoap 8.4.7 costs $65 direct from the developer. It's also available as part of the Setapp subscription service.

There is a trial version available from the developer's site which also points out that TextSoap has been around for 20 years. I could've just told the BBC to buy TextSoap version 1.0.