X-Sender: lunde@casbah.acns.nwu.edu
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.cwis-l
Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1992 15:41:51 -0600
From:         Albert Lunde <Albert-Lunde@NWU.EDU>
Subject:      SUMMARY - Tools to clean-up text
Comments: To: CWIS-L LISTSERV <CWIS-L@WUVMD.Wustl.Edu>,
          gopher-news@boombox.micro.umn.edu

I sent out the question below

>  To: CWIS-L and comp.infosystems.gopher
>
>I am writing to ask about the availablity of tools for cleaning up text for
>posting to gopher or other CWIS servers.  I'm especially interested in the
>process of converting word-processed text from Macs or PCs to a least
>common-denominator that will work on micro gopher clients and timesharing
>terminals.

Here is a summary of replies:

** Several people suggested saving text in a mono-spaced font. The best
collection of directions for this was pointed to by Steve Watkins
(watkins%SCILIBX.UCSC.EDU@WUVMD.Wustl.Edu).

These are on the University of Oregon Gopher under the headings:

 DuckScoop -- U of O campus Information
    Becoming a DuckScoop Provider
       B. Create-Convert Guidelines

(These are adapted from a document created by Computing and Network
Services at the University of Alberta.)


** Doug Anderson (danderson@frmnvax1.bitnet) suggests:

>There is a shareware tool for PCs called TEXTCON that will do some of
>what you are interested in.  As I understand it, it was developed to
>deal with the problems of transferring documents from one type of
>system to another, especially from dedicated word processors like
>Wang and NBI to PCs.
>
>It will deal with the newline problem and will expand tabs to spaces.
>It can also deal with the use of CR without LF that is sometimes used
>to produce bold, underline, etc.  It is a pretty smart program and
>allows a great deal of control through the use of command line arguments.

I couldn't find an Internet source for this, but I found it on Compuserve,
in the "IBMAPP" forum in the Library section "Word Processing (A)" as
TEXTCN.ZIP.

The shareware payment is $25 to:
          CrossCourt Systems
          1521 Greenview Ave.
          East Lansing, MI  48823
(They take phone orders at (517) 332-4353 with Mastercard or Visa.)

I haven't tested it but I looks like it could be useful.

** Jon P. Knight (jon@hill.lut.ac.uk) suggests:

>* Change spaces to tabs using expand(1) on a UNIX machine (its pretty
>common; its on SunOS and HP-UX at least and is probably available in the
>BSD Net2 release if your machine hasn't got it).

>* Consider using TeX as an intermediate form - there are many
>wordprocessor to TeX conversion utilities and then the dvi2tty display
>programs which create plaintext, nicely formatted files.  This also gets
>rid of the wordwrapping problem as TeX makes its own, usually pretty
>sane, decisions about where lines should break.  Check out some of the
>papers on hill.lut.ac.uk CFD gopher on port 5000; some of these are
>ASCII-fied Mac WORD files and others are LaTeX files converted directly
>to text.

** JQ Johnson  (jqj@ns.uoregon.edu) offered this Unix shell script:

- - -
#!/bin/sh
# this program attempts to correct some of the common problems in text
# files submitted to gopher
# Usage:
#       $0 [ -c ] file [ ... file ]
# or
#       $0 < file > newfile
# Problems addressed:
# Mac files:    cr instead of lf, long lines, stray mac characters, tabs
# PC files:     ^Z at end, long lines (n.b.: CRLF => LFLF)
# (note: still need to handle files that don't end with LF or CR)
case $# in
0 )
    # filter mode -- incompatible with compare mode
    tr '\015\032' '\012\012' | expand |
        sed -e 's/$//' -e 's//\
/g' \
                -e 's/"/"/g' -e 's/"/"/g' -e 's/ /*/g' -e 's/ /.../g' \
                -e "s/'/'/g" -e 's/ /Copyright  /' -e 's/ /--/g' |
        fmt -s
    ;;
* ) # file mode
    MVORCOMPARE=mv
    if [ "$1" = "-c" ]; then
        # compare mode
        MVORCOMPARE=cmp
        shift
    fi
    for file do
        <$file  tr '\015\032' '\012\012' | expand |
           sed -e 's/"/"/g' -e 's/"/"/g' -e 's/ /*/g' -e 's/ /.../g' \
                -e "s/'/'/g" -e 's/ /Copyright  /' -e 's/ /--/g' |
           fmt -s  >/tmp/fixit.$$
        if [ $MVORCOMPARE = mv ]; then
                mv /tmp/fixit.$$ $file
        else
                cmp -s /tmp/fixit.$$ $file || echo $0: $file needs fixing
                rm -f /tmp/fixit.$$
        fi
        done
    ;;
esac

- - -

** kai@berkp.uadv.uci.edu (Kai-Joachim Kamrath) comments:

>Your question brings to mind a broader question: consistency in layout and
>design.  Perhaps it would make sense for the list to discuss standards of
>consistency in layout of documents available at a gopher site.  For example,
>I've noticed that most documents don't contain a date within them.  As
>quicky things change in computing, it would be helpful to see the date an
>article was written; you could easily skip anything which appears to be out
>of date based on date written alone.  I'd suggest that any gopher-able
>document should contain a date written in the first few lines of text, so
>users can easily skip if deemed old.


** As for myself, I favor QUED/M for the Mac (a commercial programmers
editor) for cleaning up text, but as I said in my original posting, I don't
have the operation neatly "packaged". It can be used to word wrap to a
fixed width, expand tabs, convert line breaks, delete odd characters, and
search and replace arbitrary characters. It has a macro capabability, but I
haven't used this to put these features all together.
---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu
                                      alunde@nuacvm.bitnet
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU