Walter Logeman wrote: > > In > > other words, I'd like to convert the text output from what > > comes out of col -b into something that would have each > > "paragraph" on a single long line so I can easily copy and > > paste it into a wiki. > > To piggy back on this... I used an editor in Windows called > Textpad which allowed me to easily remove all the par endings. > or reformat to a new line length. The editors i have tried Kate > and Kwrite do not seem to have this option ... is there one > around? I know... emacs - but I am not in the space to learn a > new system... so far there are only two programs I miss from > Windows - Textpad and Forte Agent - I am sure there are better > ones here anyway, just have not found them.
Walter (or anyone), I'm not familiar with Textpad so I'm curious about how it does that -- in Word I use search and replace to get rid of paragraph endings -- depending on what's in the document. In other words, I look at it with the view hidden text option on, and then I may do things like: (a sequence): * replace all ^p^p (two paragraph marks in a row) with %% (some odd symbols not used in the document) * replace all ^p (a single paragraph mark) with " " * replace all %% with ^p I wrote the above from memory -- I might have found some better ways, but can't recall at this time -- there usually is some manual cleanup to do. or, under other circumstances, * replace " " (4 spaces) with " " Again, at times I'll go further, like then replacing "." with ". " (or something like that) -- again, there is manual clean up to do. The best editor I've found so far in Linux (IMHO) is nedit which includes search and replace using regular expressions, macros, and (incidentally), some ways to vary the wrapping of a line (I've only used what they call "continuous wrap" (I call it soft wrap) -- it wraps the text to the width of the screen while in nedit, not permanently -- in other words it does not insert any "paragraph marks". Usually I still do the changes described above in Word, but nedit is certainly capable of them. Does Textpad have some better magic? Can you describe it or point to a link? Thanks, Randy Kramer PS: Nedit is included in Mandrake, 7.2 and 8.1, but was not installed by default on my last 8.1 install. IIRC, on a previous install I did find it on the disks and manually installed it after the install. Unfortunately, nedit looks a little klunky because it is based on lesstif and the lesstif widget set -- not as "spiffy" as a typical kde application. Some things are a little tricky -- it took a little learning on my part to be able to repeat a search and replace -- I had to learn to click the Keep Dialog checkbox before doing the first search -- otherwise, IIRC, it disappears and clears the search and replace strings. Also, the idiom of search and replace was a little strange to me (different than what I'm used to) -- after you find and replace the first instance, it doesn't automatically find the next instance -- you have to click find again. Now I'm wondering why I consider this my favorite editor in Linux (and I haven't checked them all). It shows black text on a white background by default. (Things like Cool Edit, IIRC, had some hard to read color combinations by default.) It has the soft wrap feature (few other editors had that). It has macros (few other editors had that). It has regular expression search and replace (I think several other editors had that). My search was a fairly quick comparison of the editors installed by default on Mandrake 7.2 -- these included kedit, kwrite, the k binary editor, cooledit, gedit, xedit, yudit. I ignored vim and emacs (I learned the important part of vim in an earlier experience (:q), and the important part of emacs (don't start it) ;-) -- I also ignored the "command line" editors like joe, jstar, pico -- I do use joe and jstar at the command line. (I may have sold pico short, but I heard it described as a simple editor -- I was looking for a full featured editor.)
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