Three Top Tools for Text

In the spirit of Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List and Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror "Support Your Favorite Small Software Vendor" here's Jim's much less prominent list of great text tools worth paying for. This short list of tools has been priceless to me in the production of our Wrox Chapters On Demand project and also the new Wrox First wikis.

For Chapters on Demand, my biggest direct task was creating the web descriptions for the initial launch of 1700+ chapters. For the chapter descriptions, the team decided on using each chapter's introduction. We had a production assistant who delivered to me a single Word file for each book with all of that book's chapter introduction.

The first tool I needed was something to produce cleaner HTML for more than 80 books worth of introductions. The tool I chose for that was Zapadoo's Word Cleaner (http://www.zapadoo.com/). Word Cleaner's strengths for me are:

1. Clean HTML with a choice of inline CSS, CSS in a separate file, or no CSS.
2. A great template system for setting up different automatic conversions. Each template can contain a series of search and replace commands to give you even more power over the finished HTML it produces. Individual templates can contain as many search and replaces as you want and you can also chain templates together.
3. Batch processing. Once I had a template set up doing all the replacements I needed, it did all 80+ conversions in under a minute.
4. Regular expression search and replace.
5. A 30 day free trial. This was essential for me as I really needed a little time to test the tool to make sure I could get what I needed out of it.

All in all a very nice tool at a very affordable price of $99 US. I really recommend this for anyone who has Word documents and needs HTML from them. Thanks to the easy to set up multiple conversion templates, Word Cleaner is also getting a workout as my tool of choice for preparing Word chapters for use in the Wrox First wikis.

The next step in the process was to add each book's ISBN into the chapter description HTML files with the chapter number. The combination of book ISBN and chapter number are how I found each description and identified which chapter SKU it's going to get later. While it's possible that Word Cleaner's reg ex replacements included a filename insertion command, I couldn't find it so rather than battling it, I just found another inexpensive search and replace reg ex tool from Funduc Software (http://www.funduc.com/) creating titled "Search and Replace." It's highlights for me:

1. Batch processing capabilities
2. saving defined replacements
3. filename insertion command.

At only $25, Search and Replace was a no brainer tool choice for me. It saved me untold hours I might have spent sorting through the search and replace with a less sophisticated tool. And don't take my word for it, I first found Funduc and Search and Replace on Hanselman's Ultimate Tools List.

From there, the last thing I needed to do to get the HTML I needed was replace the placeholder ISBN and chapter number combination with the actual SKU for each chapter. The SKU is the identifier (instead of a typical book ISBN) we are using for each individual chapter. The SKU is what's going to allow our internal automated catalog system to read by batches of HTML files and drop each description into the right place in the catalog. My tool for this step is, SadMan Software's XChange (http://www.sadmansoftware.com/xchange/). The features here that got the job done for me were:

1. Batch list processing across multiple files. I start with a list of SKUs by ISBN and chapter in an Excel file and create a text file from Excel with a list of 1700 search a replaces replacing each chapter/sku combination with the right sku. Xchange did all 1700 search and replaces across all 80+ book files in under a minute.

All three of these tools shared several common traits:

1. Free trial periods, which I needed to test each one.
2. Low cost. At $25-$100 for these, it's really easy to justify buying any of them.

After those text tools, I have one more bonus recommendation not for text and HTML but for PDF. A lot of the work we've been doing revolves around PDFs. The answer to a question we get over and over in the Wrox p2p.wrox.com forums "how do I create PDFs in .NET" for us has been Active PDF ToolKit (http://www.activepdf.com/products/serverproducts/Toolkit/index.cfm). When I first recommended it, we were just using it to add the customer-specific watermarks to the footer of each Wrox Blox we sell. It's a programmer's toolkit that let us program the various bits of data we want watermarked in each output PDF. From there, we've also extended it to automate the creation of the Chapter on Demand PDFs we sell, making the changes to each print chapter PDF to make them more suitable for sale individually. Like the previously mentioned text products, it has a free trial license available, which was a real necessity so our programmer could test it before we made the valuable $900 licensing investment. (Prices range from $99-899 depending on your license needs and there are discounts for multiple server licenses.)

Comments

[matt]

i am a power user of pdfs and recommending active pdf is not the best choice. i switched to dynamic pdf from active pdf several years ago and have never looked back. the performance difference is unbelievable and feature set is much better. i cursed activepdf just about everyday for 5 years...