5.3 Clean-Up |
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Tutorial > Lesson 5: Editing... > 5.3 Clean-Up Suppose somebody sent you this Email: Subject Fwd seti Hi Joe, I received the following, and hoped you could put it into the newsletter. Thanks! FYI - the URL is http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ >>> >>>SETI@HOME IS A SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT >>>THAT WILL HARNESS THE POWER OF HUNDREDS >>>OF THOUSANDS OF INTERNET-CONNECTED >>>COMPUTERS IN THE SEARCH FOR >>>EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE (SETI). >>>YOU CAN PARTICIPATE BY RUNNING A >>>PROGRAM THAT DOWNLOADS AND ANALYZES >>>RADIO TELESCOPE DATA. THERE'S A SMALL >>>BUT CAPTIVATING POSSIBILITY THAT YOUR >>>COMPUTER WILL DETECT THE FAINT MURMUR >>>OF A CIVILIZATION BEYOND EARTH.
Looks like good information, but what a mess! And now you have to put it into your newsletter, which you compose using the word processor, or web page editor of your choice. You know you have to do a lot of clean-up, to make this fit into your format. For starters, it has those ugly >>> marks. Next, it's all caps. And finally, it's broken into individual lines of text, containing a hard carriage return at the end of each line. You want just one long line, so the word processor can handle the word-wrapping.
No problem! ClipMate has tools to help you fix this. Copy the text above, starting with the first set of >>> marks, continuing to the bottom. Now you see it in ClipMate's editor, and we can start working on it. Step 1 - Get rid of the >>> marks. Play with the shift right button. Keep going left, and you'll see that it gets "stuck" on the left margin, when it runs out of "white space". By default, it'll only collapse tabs and spaces. This is to keep you from accidentally chewing up your data. Now hold down the CTRL key, and click the shift-left again. Now it destroys the first column of '>' symbols. The CTRL key tells it "destroy ANY character in column 1". Do it twice more, and you have removed all of them. Be careful - there is no Undo for this. Step 2 - Remove the unwanted line-breaks. Click on the Remove Line-Breaks button.
Step 3 - Fix the case. Click the little arrow attached to this button:
Step 4 - Paste. Now paste into your word processor. You'll find that the data now will readily flow the way you want it, and the garbage is gone.
Step 5 – Use The Text Clean-Up Tool We can do all of this in one easy step. Copy the text over again, to create a new clip. Then click on the "magic hat" button,
Note that you can also use the new UNDO button, to UNDO an operation. You can only undo the last operation.
Step 6 – Drag and Drop You can use Drag 'n' Drop to re-arrange data within a clip. Copy this sentence:
This order is in the wrong sentence.
Now in the ClipMate Editor, double-click the word "order". Hold down your mouse button, and drag it to the right, and drop right before the 's' in the word "sentence". It should drop right there. Now highlight "sentence" and drag to where "order" used to be. You have to be conscious of spacing, etc., but once you get the hang of it, it's really neat.
Next Lesson: 5.4 Advanced Editing Techniques
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