Saturday, January 7th, 2006, 6:02 am
Plain Text Justify and Hyphenate
Filed under:
Giving the more professional look to your text
HIS blog item revolves around a wonderful Perl script which can revolutionise the layout of your plain-text messages, giving them looks reminiscent of that found in professional literature. The tool is called the Paragraph Adjuster with Hyphenation and it is of course free.
To give an example of its use, a file I created in ~/Main/Programs/Scripts/indent.sh contains the following:
perl ~/Main/Programs/paradj/paradj.pl --width=74 -h -n -b
~/in > ~/out
kedit ~/out
The first command invokes the script from its path and passes it some arguments, which are personalised. The input come from the file in and output is sent to a reserved file (out) which acts as a common container and somewhat of a placeholder. The last command makes the output available to me (on screen) to copy and then paste, often to be used in newsgroups, mailing lists, and rarely in E-mail too.
The script is based on a Perl module that was inherited from TEX. The LATEX family is rather presentation-aware and smart in terms of its fragmentation decisions. It ‘knows’ when it is reasonable to hyphenate and where added spaces for justification are least distracting. Maybe the same applies to indentation. There are many options in the script, which control the tendencies, the priorities and thus the behaviour of the output.
The command example above hopefully illustrates how simple it is to use the script, as well as invoking it rapidly, without too much manual intervention and input/output ‘piping’. I have also set up a shortcut (CTRL+ALT+7) to convert in to out and then copy and paste onto the required place, so indent.sh need never be called from the command-line.
Example from my most recent use of the script:
The short answer: Windows has got itself
trapped. Over the years it has adopted overly
permissive and lenient mechanisms that ne-
glected security. Security seemed like a cost
hat hindered functionality. Unauthorised in-
stallations and lacking verifications are one
example. ActiveX controllers are another.
Notice that all text lies within a rectangular block. This needs fixed-sized fonts, which cannot be guaranteed by all recipients or readers. If sent to a recipient and read by a mail client, feed reader, newsgroups reader, browser, etc., it may be displayed in whatever form the user prefers, even proportionally-differing font sets.
