The Big Green Anti-Formatting Machine!

The folks at WebMedley have created a new tool to help you in your Web creation tasks.  You may already know about the headaches that pasting from MS Word can cause.  You may also know about pasting from MS Word into Notepad to fix this problem.  Doing this can fix most of the problems, but there are still some characters that will be changed even if they are pasted from Notepad. 

For those of you that are unaware of this phenomenon, if you paste text directly from MS Word, you will bring along all of the formatting code that makes a program like MS Word so smart.  This formatting code can make things extremely difficult in WebMedley, and you might see some question marks (?) where some other characters used to be (like ", - , and ' ).  To learn more about this, read our hints and tips newsletter about this.

Now there is a tool created solely for the purpose of stripping away any extra formatting code, and bringly only the text you see into WebMedley.  This tool,  designed to be as user friendly as WebMedley, is called the Big Green Anti-Formatting machine - because you paste in text, click a button, and when the screen is green, the text is clean!

Download the Tool here:

If the Text Editor will not open up after downloading it, you may be missing some common Windows files.  This program will install those files (note: this file is 4 mb big and may take a few minutes if downloading on a 56k modem).  library files

Here's how to use this tool:

Since this is an application separate from WebMedley, you'll have to double-click on the icon to start.  After starting the text editor program, you'll see a box appear where you can paste in the text that you want to "strip down".  The box will have a blue background.  A blue background means that the text is not stripped of invisible formatting code yet. 

Step 1: Paste in or open a text file

First of all, you have to get the text you want to clean up in the green box.  This can be done by opening a notepad file by clicking the  button, or you can just paste in the text that you copied out of the word processor.  Once the text is in there, you are ready to clean it up.

Step 2: Clean up the text

Now all you have to do is click the  button.   This will strip the text of all formatting code that even MS Notepad might have missed.  The screen will turn green, which means that the text has been stripped of all formatting code.  Now you can copy  the cleaned-up text and paste  it into WebMedley and never worry about formatting code ever again!