Wrapped Up In Text

Fancy text processing, HTML generation and professional TeX typesetting are all available on OS/2. Click up a font and drop in an image, slick as you please.

But sometimes you just want some text.

Don Eitner likes text. "I still use it a lot," he says. "It's quick and I don't end up wasting time playing around with it."

We're talking plain and simple text here. Courier 10. Smith Corona. Command line. Daisy wheel printer. Wordstar 3.0.

"The thing that bugs me about text editors is that they only wrap the paragraphs on the screen while you're working in the program," continues Don. "When you save the text it's broken into individual lines which aren't wrapped, and when someone else opens it in a wider or narrower window it looks like a jumbled mess. Text isn't supposed to be perfect, but it also isn't supposed to be messy."

So Don wrote WordWrap. In fact, he wrote two versions of it.

WordWrap takes your messy text and properly wraps the lines so you don't have a long one here and a short one there. It figures out your sentences and paragraphs and nicely wraps everything you've typed. Your next quick memo, which you fire off with COPY CON MEMO.TXT and then PRINT MEMO.TXT, will look so-o-o much nicer when you've WordWrapped it. And if you like to indent your latest haiku in your outgoing emails, then a nicely WordWrapped haiku is the best email from you.

And you'll be pleased to know that there is a WordWrap for command line use plus a GUI WordWrap for those of us who are still afraid of anything that starts with "C:>".

For example, suppose you are writing to Grandma asking for her apple pie recipe and you've meticulously written the following:

WordWrap will clean that up so it looks nice enough for Grandma. What she will see is this:

"It's on Hobbes," adds Don. "Just go there and search for WordWrap. It's free, although if you like it you can send me a couple bucks for a hamburger."

For wrapping and rewrapping your memos, emails, documentation files and notes, WordWrap can't be beat. Grandma will be pleased.

Hobbes is at http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/. Search for WordWrap. And don't forget to reward Don with a couple bucks for a hamburger -- it's a great appetizer to go with his next slice of apple pie.

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