The Text Processing Alternative Not every writing job needs a "full" word processor. Often, a text editor is all that is required. A text editor will only be concerned with getting the right characters, words, sentences, and paragraphs in the right order. How everything is printed is not very important. There are some excellent, modest text editors.TextPad is a good example. It's a shareware package, with its own web site. TextPad's author encourages users to download a copy of the program and try it before buying. There is a full Windows 95 version of TextPad. It follows all of the standard conventions, which significantly reduces the learning curve for anyone familiar with Windows 95. It takes full advantage of the large memory space available under Windows 95 and will edit very large files. If you want to do something to text, there is an excellent chance that you can do it naturally with TextPad. The full feature list is extensive. It will check spelling in ten different languages (with different dictionaries). It will sort lines using three different keys. It will do straight search and replace, and also supports the use of regular expressions. The compressed file containing the full package is less than 1 MB. The full installation takes less than 3 MB of disk space. It's the antithesis of bloatware. TextPad is a modest tool that's "right" for working with text files. I use it to compose longer email messages; to clean up comma delimited database files; and for more complex HTML editing tasks. Set as the Windows default, it effectively replaces Notepad. |