Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with text

Ads where a word is worth 1000 pictures

Shepherd — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:59:36 -0800

Great text-driven (print) ads from 2009? I'm currently working on a project that involves championing the text component of advertising: finding ads where the text is front and centre as opposed to the visual, and language is used intelligently and playfully to sell an idea or concept. I've got a few things lined up, from local businesses to national campaigns, but I'd like to see more ads, most likely print/billboard ads (but TV/Web is also a possibility) where the written word (i.e. visually present, a clever script read with no words on-screen won't cut it) is the star, and does its job remarkably well. Ideas?

Please recommend books similar to Bill Simmons' Book of Basketball

reenum — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:44:05 -0800

I love Bill Simmons' "The Book of Basketball". What should I read next? I'm in the middle of Simmons NBA opus, and it fascinates as to how he's able to pack in so much info, yet have the book remain accessible. I especially love how he makes fun of and injects humor into the various characters and events in the NBA's history.

Are there other books that are basically all encompassing, sprawling accounts of a particular entity, field, event, etc., yet remain fun to read?

I know some folks might suggest Mary Roach, but I just couldn't get into her stuff.

I prefer nonfiction, but well written fiction would work too.

Thanks!

Need a text search program like a browser URL bar.

inthe80s — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:49:40 -0800

Is there a utility for Windows that will take a text file, and let you enter words into a field and remove entries from the list as you type in more words? Something like typing in the address bar of a browser, where as you type, the entries that no longer match are removed. I have a text file with entries of performer/song titles, one to a line. I generally just use the search function of a text editor to find all the matching lines for a keyword. However if there was something that would remove entries the more I typed, I wouldn't spend as much time typing out full performer names or song titles.

Winamp does this with the "Jump to file" box in it's playlist. I need something for text files however.

Back to the basics

jfricke — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:36:15 -0800

I really like the idea of text-based programs like WriteRoom (Mac) or DarkRoom (Windows). Are there similar applications for other purposes? I am looking for any software that is more or less text-based, is not a game and runs with Microsoft Windows or Mac OS. Examples would be a text based email-client, text based to-do list or a text based diary.

How to merge data fields into a plain text file?

geekgirl397 — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:04:23 -0800

Is there some way to do a "mail merge" type operation on plain text, xml or html files without using a word processor? I've been working on our company wiki and I want to bulk create a bunch of pages by merging certain field data from spreadsheets, csv files or other datasources into the template text files that I've created. The output should be XML or plain text.

I have a separate task where I have a simple html template that I'd like to populate with data pulled from a csv. The output needs to be standard, simple HTML (no funny MS Word markup)

I have access to MS Office, Open Office and Abiword but everything I've tried so far seems to "pollute" my files with word processor type formatting. (I am running KDE on Ubuntu 9.10, but I also have Win XP running as a virtual machine under Virtualbox - I have access to any version of the MS Office software, and obviously anything open source).

I'm sure there's some open source tool designed to merge text files. I'm not opposed to using a command line interface although I probably would prefer a GUI. My Google-fu is failing me on this one.

Any tips on how I should achieve this, or pointers to the tools I should be looking at?

thanks!

Best Mac text-editor to replace Homesite on a PC?

lsemel — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:04:22 -0800

For years I've been using Homesite on a PC, which was a great text editor. Now I've switched to Mac and all the text editors I find pale in comparison, despite the fact that Homesite hasn't been updated in years. Help me find one that I'll like. For years I've been using Homesite on a PC, which was a great text editor. Now I've switched to Mac and all the programmer's text editors I find pale in comparison, despite the fact that Homesite hasn't been updated in years. I've already checked out TextMate, Komodo, and Coda. Here's what I'm looking for, in order of preference:

- Easy way to browse and move between files - Specifically, I want the folders in a window at the top, and the files in a window below, like this. TextMate and Komodo mix them all up into a single tree, and on a project with thousands of files it makes it painful to navigate amongst different files. Worse, in TextMate you can't even click on a folder's name to open it, you have to aim for the little tiny triangle thingy. I can't find a single editor for Mac that presents file this way, aside from Komodo which offers this as a plugin that locks up the editor at random times.
- Ability to use non-anti-aliased text - I don't like looking at aliased text while I'm programming.
- Reasonably user-friendly - I don't want to learn arcane commands and key sequences, so vi and emacs are out.
- Decent multi-file search and replace.

That's about it. I'm flexible with all the other features, though the closer to Homesite the better. I'm using this for programming rather than HTML, so HTML-specific features aren't that important to me.

What are my options for RSS Readers that are text only?

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:13:53 -0800

What are my options for RSS Readers that are text only? I use Bloglines to read my RSS feed, but I'm trying to find a reader that can strip away all the images and display only the text. The reason is that a lot of the blogs I like to keep up on tend to post a lot of NSFW pictures and I do most of my reading at work. The mobile version of Bloglines worked for awhile, but lately has started displaying pictures too.

Anyone have any recommendations on how I can keep up with my literary porn while working for an ever watchful boss?

breaking threaded text boxes

nanhey — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:39:44 -0800

IndesignCS3Filter: Is there a way to break threaded text boxes but keep the text that is currently in the frames where it is? is there anyway to do this? i've tried searching for a script but I don't think i'm using the right search terms. thanks!

Little text manipulation help?

yesno — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:54:34 -0800

I need some help repairing some text files. I don't really understand regular expressions and so on enough. I have two badly formed mbox files.

One is missing the "From " indicator that a new message is about to begin. Instead, there's a "From: ." I need this second "From: " to stay there, as without it the messages all show up as having no sender when I import them into any client. Thus, I need a way to add a "From " to the line above each line where a "From: " occurs. As far as I know the "From " is just some mailer daemon's email that I don't really care about.

The second is the same, but the messages also show up has having a bad date. Currently, there is a field labeled along the lines of "Sent: Monday, January 13, 2003 1:11 PM." Properly mbox files seem to look like "Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 12:53:22 -0600." While just changing "sent" to "date" fix that, or do I need some really good regexing?

Innovative Book Designs

0bvious — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:37:46 -0800

Innovative Books: I am looking to compile a list of the most innovative uses of the book format. Books that break the mould in their layout and design, perhaps books that use online systems to extend their content value or push their form into new places. I am most interested in narrative and theory, but any book that is interesting (artist books etc.) would be really appreciated. I have a few examples, in order of publication, to set the ball rolling:

Compendium for literates : a system of writing by Karl Gerstner - A book about book form in an innovative form. Beautiful and still fresh

Dictionary of the Khazars: a lexicon novel in 100,000 words by Pavic - a 'dictionary novel' "written in two versions, male and female, which are identical save for seventeen crucial lines"

A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel by Tom Philips - an artist who has used one particular edition of one particular book as a space for his work for many years

The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larson - extended use of footnote, side-note and illustration to give the narrative dimension

I would love any ideas you have!

My (really not great) handwriting into pretty, pretty computer text?

eb98jdb — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:34:22 -0800

My (really not great) handwriting into pretty, pretty computer text? Is Livescribe the answer? I have to take a lot of handwritten notes in my job. This results in a lot of them being stored up in notebooks and I will never be bothered to type them all up afterwards and so alot of useful info is left to moulder. I'm looking for a solution that will enable me to make handwritten notes, transfer them to a computer and then have them OCR'd (is that a verb?) into text which I can then store and transfer.

I've seen the Pulse Smartpen.

A few points:-

1. I'm fine with using the special dotted paper
2. If relevant, running Windows XP
3. I'm not fussed about recording audio although it doesn't hurt if it's there.
4. I want to avoid (at all costs) taking notes on ordinary paper and then scanning and OCRing them
5. I've seen some stuff which involves clipping something to an ordinary sheet of paper - not sure I like the look of that.

My questions:-

1. Does this thing actually take my (admittedly not great) handwriting and convert it into text? I've seen some reviews but would be interested to hear if anyone has live experience of this
2. If it doesn't, does anyone have any recommendations of something that would do this?

Thanks for your help

How to merge multiple text files keeping original filename and date

chimrichalds — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:07:01 -0800

Hi AskMeFi. Can someone tell me how to combine 350 text files into one large text file so that the original filenames and dates are included above (or below) each entry? I'm using Vista Home Premium and they are all generic .txt files. I'm moving all of my notes into Evernote but want to save the names and dates of the individual txt files.

Is there some sort of service that will tell you how long it will take to read a certain number of words?

rileyray3000 — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:49:41 -0800

Giving a speech filter: IS there any online service or program that you can put in a block of text and it will tell approximately you how long it'll take to read it out loud? So I'm giving a speech next week that's got to be five minutes long. I'm usually better at writing these things out ahead of time. And I have no problem with the public speaking. I just want to know how many words I should shoot for with five minutes.

I realize I could just record myself and then trim but I really don't want to put in that much effort. It's not a super important speech. Just one that's supposed to go a pretty set time.

So is there any online service that estimates these things? I realize I could always put it in a speech synthesizer and time it but I'm hoping there's something little more cut and paste.

Does this exist?

Books are Rad, Let's Spread the Word!

micklaw — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:46:34 -0800

DonatingTextbooksInAustraliaFilter: How would I go about donating a heap of recent secondary school textbooks to worthy causes. I'm in Melbourne, Australia. My aunt (actually) has a whole stack of textbooks that my cousins no longer need (having recently finished school) and they can't sell back to the school as new editions have come out.

There are textbooks on a whole range of subjects (English, Maths, Geography, Physics, French etc) and they are all in excellent condition.

They are looking to donate them to an organisation that could distribute them overseas or even within Australia to those who might not be able to easily access these books. The oldest book would only be 4 or 5 years old and most are very recent.

My question then is who could we pass these books on to to get the most out of them

The stuff Dreamweaver's are made of

sandra_s — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:08:27 -0800

Dreamweaver CS3 on Vista slows to a halt when typing or adding text. My laptop is a Vista machine with 4gb ram. I Just replaced Dreamweaver MX, which I use for years on my XP box and on this laptop.

I was having problems with MX not assigning tables correctly and was advised that since it was older and not written for Vista, I would need to upgrade to a Vista-compatible version.

I bought CS3. That fixed the tables problem, but the inputting of text is SO SLOW. If you try to manually type it in, after the first character it just "thinks about it" and locks up the whole program for 2-10 minutes. Yes, thats 2-10 minutes.

Same thing with pasting text. ctrl+v equals a similar wait.

it will eventually do it, but to enter in 3 paragraphs is taking somewhere just under an hour.

Dreamweaver is useless to me like this, but I paid a lot of money for it, so I'd really like to find a fix.

Any thoughts?

Natural Language Processing, relative basis for search.

kuatto — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:05:43 -0800

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Filter. I'm looking for a method (or category of methods) to judge the relevancy of a small unit of text, 100-200 chars, against similar units of text. I have a large set of these textual units, I'm trying to discover the "relatedness" of my query unit (an item drawn from that set) to any other unit in the set, but judged relatively to the set as a whole.

In other words, I'm not looking for just an ordered list of rankings of my query applied to every document in the set. Rather an ordered list of rankings of my query applied to every document in the set then normalized by the magnitude of my query applied to the set as a whole (perhaps via some averaging function.)

Do traditional search engines (open source, like lucene or xapian) do this already?

What I mean by relatedness is that we are talking about the same things by some, arbitrary, empirical measure. In other words, there is no supervised or unsupervised learning, just some off-the-shelf measure of 'relatedness'.

Batch convert Word docs to text files?

yarrow — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:29:40 -0800

Batch convert Word docs to text files? Does anyone know of a utility to convert a large number of Word documents (hundreds) to text files in Windows XP? They are in Word 2003 (.doc) format. The Word docs are about a 1MB each because they have images, but the text files they turn into are only about 4KB. I want to run a text processing script I wrote in perl on them, but I'm not sure how to get them in text format in the first place without opening each and converting it by hand. Looking for free solutions if possible, just because it's a pain for me to pay for software at work.

Web graphics and ads filter?

jpg15 — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:53:11 -0800

Web filter filter: I seem to remember a link to an NYT article that just contained the full text of the article in nice big letters, with no graphics, banners, or ads. It was fully attributed, with links to the original, but it was much more pleasant to read, especially for a long article. Is there a website that will filter out the clutter and provide links that can be forwarded?

How to delete an IM on Skype before it is received? [AccidentalInappropriateMessageFilter]

anthropomorphic — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:29:41 -0800

My boyfriend Skype-IMed his mother a very dirty greeting that was meant for me. It still shows the circling icon that I think happens when you try to send a user a message when the user does not have Skype running at the time. Is there any way to delete this before she gets it? He's freaking out, as you would too, if I told you what he just told his mother.

How can I have Google Voice send my SMS to an instant message service such as Google talk?

jesirose — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:50:12 -0800

How can I have Google Voice send my SMS to an instant message service such as Google talk? I have no text messaging plan, however I have a google voice account. (Formerly Grand Central). I also have the chat in Gmail and an AIM account. I have an app for my iPhone beejive IM which thanks to 3.0 can now push my messages to the phone.

So. If there is a number I can forward the SMS messages to which will send them to my GTalk chat or an AOL im screenname, I can then be notified instantly, instead of having to check the website for texts.

Googling turned up something about a 406 number for GTalk but I cannot find the info I apparently need.

Thanks!!

(No, I don't have any Google Voice invites, they're not doing them. Sorry :( )

Looking for a printer without the problems of finicky ink.

blueberry — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:36:09 -0800

[MomFilter] Looking for a reasonably cheap, reliable printer (for printing text) for an iMac. Leaning towards laser as the experiences with inkjets have been that bouts of little use lead to still full, yet dry and thus worthless ink cartridges. Looking for a printer for my Mom's iMac. She is wanting to print up a bunch of stories she has written, so the printer will only be used for text.
(No need for color, an attached scanner, or anything else)

She's had two cheap inkjets in the past where they were cheap to buy, but then you got gouged on the ink cartridges. These printers would up being a bit like "disposables" or white elephants—either getting gummed up after a while, or she'd not print anything for a month or two by which time the ink would have dried up or otherwise stopped working.

Fellow MeFites, do you own or know of any reasonably cheap (both pre- and post-sale), reliable b/w laser printers that you can recommend out there? Also, am I correct in guessing that laser toner has a longer "shelf life"?

Or, if lasers are too spendy, do you own or can you otherwise recommend an über-reliable inkjet that, say, you can just buy black ink for, and you've never had gum up or dry up on you?

Thanks all!

Which prepaid cell company to use?

reenum — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:49:26 -0800

PrepaidCellFilter: Two questions about prepaid cell plans: 1. Can I use a phone I buy off eBay with one of these plans, or is it essential to use the phones provided by the carrier? 2. If I'm mostly interested in texting, which prepaid cell provider would be the best for me? I'm thinking of ditching my Sprint contract and switching to a prepaid carrier. I only use the cell to call people if there is an emergency and little else.

However, I do like texting and would like to try and choose a plan that allows unlimited or a high number of texts at a reasonable price.

Also, I'd like to have a nicer phone with T9 rather than the cheapo Nokia phones some of these carriers give you.

So, Hive Mind, what say you?

Recurring text box in Word?

Shepherd — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:03:17 -0800

I need to make a sticker sheet in MS Word updatable -- all the stickers on the sheet look the same, but if I type "Q" in the first sticker, "Q" will appear on all the other stickers. Is this possible? Working on making an Avery-compatible label sheet for a company that only sells eight different things, but in a range of varying sizes. So ideally, he'll be able to print label sheets one sheet at a time, with the same product type on every label on the sheet (say, GRAPPLEGROMMET ALPHA), and then a space to the left of the first GRAPPLEGROMMET ALPHA sticker, where he can type an XXS, XS, S, M, L, XL or XXL and see every other sticker on the sheet update automatically.

Idea being this saves (a) the time-consuming process of typing S on every single sticker on the sheet when he needs a bunch of "S" stickers for GRAPPLEGROMMET ALPHA, and (b) saves the time-consuming process of doing that ourselves, and then creating 64 label templates when all we really need are 8.

I would think that there's a simple way of doing this, but everything I look at veers abruptly into Visual Basic programming and odd form-driven functions that don't really work. Is there some way of just making a text box whose contents will be copied in linked text boxes across the same document?

How to Curve a Multi line text box in CS2

Man_in_staysis — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:51:18 -0800

How do I curve a text box in Adobe Illustrator CS2 I have Adobe Illustrator CS2 and I'm looking for a way to curve a text box.

I know you can curve a single line of text along a path however, you don't seem to be able to curve a multi line text box along that same path.

I have also seen how you can apply an arch or other similar effects to a multi line text box bt hese do not seem to work very well.

If anyone knows how to do this, it would save a life time of extra work.

How do I stop getting AOL IM's texted to my phone?

TwilightKid — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:00:58 -0800

I'm on a Mac and I use the program Adium to access my AOL IM account. I also have a Blackberry Bold....At some point, I decided to try the feature of connecting my AOL IM account to my cell phone which would allow me to receive IM's on my phone even when I am logged off from the service...Now I don't know how to make it stop.. I don't recall actually when or how I set this feature up....I originally set it up when I had my iphone.

So, I have basically when through every possible Adium option, as well as looking through my AOL IM program on m blackberry and even logging on through AOL IM on the computer... I cannot figure out how to remove my cell phone number from this process. I want to stop being texted with IM's on my phone..... I have the app for AOL IM on the phone now, so I do not need this other feature...

Much thanks for any guidance...