TEXT documents, especially those originating on “foreign” systems, are often formatted inappropriately for use on a Macintosh.  These documents may contain unnecessary control characters, too many carriage returns, the wrong kind of quotation and apostrophe marks, and so forth.  Manually reformatting them into a more desirable form can be a tedious and time-consuming task.

A/S was designed to clean up TEXT documents destined for import to page layout, word processing, database, or spreadsheet programs, as well as those headed to a DOS-based, mainframe computer, or other “foreign” system.  All done in a fraction of the time ordinarily needed to manually reformat using a word processor.

Besides performing a process such as converting space runs to a single tab, A/S can simultaneously perform other actions such as altering case, replacing multiple user-specified character strings, stripping control characters, curling or uncurling quotes, limiting the number of blank lines, and more.  It can also batch process entire folders, manipulating every document in a specific folder.

Documents to be processed must be saved as Text Only.  These files contain no style or font information, only the actual typed characters.  Formatted files that were not saved as Text Only cannot be effectively manipulated by A/S.