MacWorld 1998 October/Macworld (1998-10).dmg/Shareware World/Utilities/Text Processing/GST-Caesura/Caesura Cuts Up...

Text File | 1998-08-01 | 7KB | 188 lines

Understanding Caesura

version 1.0.1

©1998 by Greg Swann

8/1/98

Greg Swann

[e-mail]
[e-mail]

USPS: 3608 West Cochise Drive
      Phoenix, AZ 85051



First the important stuff: Caesura is pronounced "sez you're a"; I
leave it to you to decide "a what"... It's Latin, meaning "to cut",
and if you listen closely you can hear the word "scissors" in there.

Now the trivia: what does this do?

Caesura cuts, which is not a long leap. It cuts files of type 'TEXT'
into chunks that are more manageable or more useful. I'd like to say
that it's the most useful of my utilities, but I know this is untrue.
Caesura exists to fulfill a need you will have infrequently. But when
you _do_ have that need, it will do the job quickly and cleanly,
without a lot of painful hacking away in a text editor.

I expect that you'll find that Caesura works best in conjunction with
XP8 and Torquemada, two other utilites of mine. In particular,
Caesura can be helpful in reducing the complexity (and hence running
time) of Torquemada sets.



Commercial, legal and other pertinent notices:

XP8 is a text file reformatter. It will clean up and make
QuarkXPress-ready Macintosh or DOS text files. Among many other
features, it intelligently reformats paragraphs, converts the DOS or
WordStar character sets to their Mac equivalents, substantially
improves the hyphenation and justification of text, converts quotes
better than any software currently available, and traps for XPress
Tags errors that might otherwise result in missing text or
irreversible document corruption. A semi-inhibited shareware version
of XP8 is available on Info-Mac and other
electronic information services. The full commercial release can be
obtained from Greg Swann as explained below.

Torquemada The Inquisitor is batch global search and replace software
with wildcards, pattern matching, string substitution, et very cetera.
With Drag & Drop under System 7 or above, you can run up to 640 searches on up to
128 files in one batch. Features the most intelligent case-conversion we
know of. The most-recent FreeWare version (1.1.0) can be found in the
Info-Mac archives as
GST-TorqueDemo.sit. The current commercial version is 1.3.0, offering a
great many enhancements, including new "wildthings" and a _lot_ of new
User Interface power. The commercial version ships with Torquemada's
Ghost, a scriptable, backgroundable Torquemada. A DemoWare version of
Torquemada's Ghost is available in the
Info-Mac archives as GST-TGhostDemo.sit.

Full commercial versions of XP8 and Torquemada can be obtained from
Greg Swann at:

[e-mail]

or

Greg Swann
3608 West Cochise Drive
Phoenix, AZ 85051

Licenses are sold per machine, with a single license costing $50;
2-10 licenses are $45 each; and for 11 or more licenses you're
better off buying a site license. All of this is explained in the
registration software supplied with this archive.

Caesura is freeware now, and will be forever and always.

Caesura is delivered "as is", without any warranties, expressed or
implied. It is not warranted to be useful _to_ anyone, _for_
anything, and in no wise am I to be held responsible for any
unfortunate consequences resulting from its use or misuse. And I
_hate_ having to say things like that. I do my best to write useful,
simple, elegant, bug-free solutions to difficult problems. In this
case, I am giving of my labor at no charge at all. If you take it
into your head that I represent your big chance to 'strike it rich,'
you will pay a lot in legal fees to discover that you have
miscalculated.

And: to those to whom the above disclaimer does not apply: forgive me
for having to make it. It's _you_ whom I'm working for, for pay or
for free. I appreciate your custom and your support, and I wish we
all could just comb the others out of our hair...



Using Caesura

Caesura is very straightforward in operation. There is but one dialog
box. In that box is space to define a STRING LITERAL that STARTS A
PARAGRAPH. Where that string literal is found, the source file will
cut, as directed by the radio button group below.

A 'string literal' is actual readable text, without any wildcards. It
must match the source file exactly, and case is sensitive. In
consequence, the best way to define this string is by Pasting from
your source file.

The string literal must live at the very start of a paragraph in the
source file. We are not searching 'through' paragraphs to find the
string.

At each place where the string is found, the current output file will
be truncated, and a new file will be started. The files will be named
'file.001', 'file.002', etc. Caesura will create up to 998 files in
this fashion, surely enough for anyone.

The radio botton group at the bottom of the dialog box tells Caesura
where to effect the cut. If you are cutting at a common header, such
as "Splendex Corporation 1998 Annual Report", you would select
'Divide at paragraph-ending BEFORE string'. If you are segmenting at
a common footer, such as "See accompanying Notes to Consolidated
Financial Statements", you would select 'Divide at paragraph-ending
AFTER string'.

If you do not specify a string, Caesura will create a copy of your
file.

When you hit the 'Start…' button, Caesura prompts you for a file to
operate on. The new files will be created in the same folder, and the
original file will not be altered in any way.



Caesura in real life...

If you find yourself using this a lot, I'd love to hear from you.
Almost I talked myself out of doing it, so few were the uses I could
think up for it. But here are a small few:

* If you have a job that comes in one enormous file, you can save
yourself a lot of Mac-sluggishness by cutting it up into smaller
chunks and working on those. If necessary, use one of my file
concatenators (Catena or Cat o' Seven Tails) to put the pieces back
together at the end.

* If you have a file that come in logically distinct segments, and if
it behooves you to operate on those segments in logically distinct
ways, Caesura will slice 'em up quick like. I'm thinking here of
financial work, as an example, where the work to be done on the
tables is largely different from the work to be done on the text.

* If you have a job that needs an exceptional amount of Torquemada
intelligence, and if the Torquemada set is taking forever to run
because each and every 'wildstring' used is going to the end of the
buffer before it fails, it can be emeinently worth your while to
segment the source file.

* Finally, if you are experiencing buffer-bounding errors using
'wildstrings' in Torquemada, these will go away if you use Caesura to
cut your source file in segements 16K or smaller.

(The last two are best understood by reference to the manual that
ships with the Torquemada release archive.)



Fair warnings...

* Caesura is 32-bit clean and System 7 compatible. It is not,
however, System 6 hostile, nor does it support Drag & Drop (didn't
make much sense, given that you _have_ to interact with it).

* If you speak with a lilt, a burr, a brogue or a twang, I will do
my best to ignore your importunate feature requests in order to prove
that I can (grin).



That's it. Happy cutting...

Greg Swann