With all the Web-capable software on the market designed to deal with all the Web-based networks and information sources now dominating today's computing, what world really needs is a good... text editor.
Yeah, TEXT editor. As in plain vanilla ASCII text.
Fortunately, there is an excellent choice available: NoteTab Pro from Geneva-based Fookes Software, which is well worth the $19.95 list price. Fookes also makes a freeware version, NoteTab Light and a $9.95 "Standard" edition. But the extra functions and speed enhancements in Pro are worth the modest extra charge. The program runs without problems in all versions of Windows, including the new Windows 2000.
As with all Windows text editor replacements, NoteTab is not subject to Windows Notepad's pathetic 64 KB file size limit. NoteTab accommodates files up to 16 MB. It has the added charm of making little drain on system resources: as I am writing this, NoteTab is consuming 3.5 MB of RAM compared with 30 MB for Microsoft Word. And, of course, no macro viruses to worry about.
Pro includes a spell checker and thesaurus, will give you a word count, do search and replace, supports hyperlinks, can be configured to display nonprinting characters, has a "favorites" feature, and has numerous setup options.
Of course, no formatting either. But you can select print and screen fonts, as well as set margins and headers. Besides, the absence of formatting is precisely the point.
In theory, Microsoft Office 2000 is Web-savvy. You are supposed to be able to move items to and from HTML formatting with ease, thus enabling seamless desktop to Internet/intranet information exchanges.
In reality, what you actually get is a formatting mess. I never know at any given moment how Web content will appear in Word 2000. Sometimes the content will take on the formatting characteristics of the document into which I want to paste it; sometime it clings stubbornly to its Web formatting. I don't even want to discuss what happens with Outlook 2000.
With rare exceptions (tabular material being one of them), I find it much easier to copy the Web material, dump it into the text editor to "launder" the formatting, then paste into an Office application. While any text editor can do that, NoteTab shines with more exotic tasks:
- You can open up a HTML file, and NoteTab will strip out the
HTML tags, leaving you with just the text.
- You can paste in an email file full of ">" quoting characters,
and NoteTab can strip them.
- If line wrapping is off in the text, NoteTab can sort that out also, and there's a function to get rid of the double-paragraph marks typically used for paragraph separation in text files.
In other words, NoteTab can clean all the junk out of Web page and email data, so you can format it your way in a word processor. However, it "adds" as well as "subtracts." The program allows you to take text files and turn them into Web pages, providing a variety of shortcuts for putting HTML tags into place. You wouldn't want to do General Motors' Web site with it, but NoteTab can do a lot of routine HTML creation and repair.
It's also a nice tool for preparing postings for those ubiquitous Web forms, allowing you to spell check, tidy up spacing, and save a copy for the equally ubiquitous failures of the Web forms to go through. In fact, I find myself using the program frequently when I just want to make a quick note, as I can get a lot of notes jotted down in the time Word takes to open. Less, indeed, can be more.
Product information and ordering ($19.95):
http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/306/tr.cgi?fproduct
