5.3 Clean-Up

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. Click it twice, and you'll see the whole paragraph move over to the right, by two columns.  Now go back left.  Neat!

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.  The data changes dramatically.   If  you now see only one line of text, click the WordWrap button, to force the data to wrap within the display.  Note that this doesn't change the data - it's really one big long line of text, and your word processor will wrap it for you, as it sees fit.

Step 3 - Fix the case.  Click the little arrow attached to this button: , if it is present - otherwise click on the button itself.  You'll have a menu of 4 case options.   Experiment with each, to see the effect. You'll want to end up on Sentence Case.   Experiment with selections - use your mouse to highlight just the last sentence, and notice how you can make this function operate just on the selection, and leave the rest alone. All 4 of these buttons (in the last group) act this way.

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,  and you'll get a dialog asking what options you want.  It should already be set to remove the >> symbols from the left margin – leave that turned on.  Under the Paragraph Re-Formatting, select the second option, which removes unwanted linebreaks within paragraphs. Finally, select "sentence case" under the Change Case  option.  Press OK, and see the results.

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