Paragraph Program Download

Program:Paragraph.Exe
Paragraph formatter and HTML tag application

This is a handly little program which helps out with formatting of text files for posting on the web. I wrote it because of the difficulty of using text copied and pasted from email into other programs or forms on the Internet, which comes out ragged looking due to the fixed paragraph marks in emailed text.

Download Paragraph.exe

Download Help file
For the helpfile, rightclick on line and choose "Save target as.." otherwise your browser may attempt to open it instead of saving it.

Installer Version
This version, ParaInstall.exe, will automatically install both program and helpfile for you.

To get an idea of what this program does, here is the Help File which comes with the program:

Program Update and New Help File
Rumor Mill News Agent's Program

Yes, already another program update for Paragraph.exe! I've been working hard! I finally got a decent help file written. For those wondering if the program might be useful to them, the helpfile is reproduced below, which tells everything the program does so far. The more I improve it the more I use it for all kinds of things! Let me know if there's a feature you would like to see implemented.

You can get the program update here:
http://prahlad.org/pub/paragraph.exe

Right click on THIS link and choose "Save target as.." for the help file only (Otherwise your browser will try to open it in Word or something):
parahelp.rtf

Much easier, get both with the easy self-installer program here:
ParaInstall.exe

The Newest Improvements are:

See:

PARAGRAPH PROGRAM UPDATE

ADDED GSPELL AND SEND PAGE

BROWSER ADDED

1. The Helpfile now does double duty as an extra window from which you can cut and paste text into your article! Just click the "Help" button, then right-click on the helpfile window and you can load any text file into the help window. Select some text you want, copy it, close the helpfile window, and paste it into your document. I know that Raye will like this!

2. You can now make any file the default helpfile. This is useful when you have learned the program and don't need the helpfile any more. For example you could make a file of boilerplate paragraphs for using to respond to Emails when you want to tell a number of people the same things. Or it could contain links that you want to use often in your posts, or addresses, or any stuff at all that you want handy to copy from. A "re-usable text" repository. These features are available on the right-click menu of the helpfile window. "Make this the default helpfile" will cause the file you have loaded to become the "new helpfile" which is loaded automatically at startup. "Revert to original helpfile" will cause the original "real" helpfile to be loaded at startup.

3. You can now insert a website-specific search link into your posts to search any website you specify. Click on the "Anyfile Search" button and enter the web address of the website you want the user to be able to search. For example, supposing you are talking about Paul Wolfowitz. You can let the reader look him up at a bunch of websites:

WhatReallyHappened.com, WorldNetDaily.com, Rense.com, AbcNews.com, or CNN.com, etc. etc. Try the links. You can hand the reader a quick research tool on any subject!

4. You can now set your own search terms for the website specific search links. Before the links just searched for the text you had selected, but I realized this was not good enough. Now you can edit the string that will actually be fed into Google, allowing for all manner of searches. 5. In the Swap Characters panel you can now enter the replacement strings directly into two little edit boxes. Sometimes this is easier and faster. 6. Fixed a bunch of little buggy bugs! The undo button now works as it should, undoing the last formatting change you made.

Here's the new helpfile for those who may be wondering what the heck is this crazy Rumor Mill News Agent's Program anyway? It explains all the features so far.

Billym's Little
Rumor Mill News Agent's Program
(To close this file, click on it and then press Escape - "Esc")

I wrote this little Paragraph program, paragraph.exe, as an aid to preparing short articles for posting at the Rumor Mill News Forum. It solves a number of problems when preparing text for posting on the Internet, including HTML formatting, and straightening out text copied and pasted from Emails. You can actually make simple web pages with it. I simply write all my articles in this program, format them, and then simply paste them into the forum input box.

1. Fixing Fixed-line-length Text

The main problem this program solves is making wordwrapped text from text copied from Email or other sources which have fixed line lengths. Often when pasting text from certain sources, such as Email, into a wordwrapped environment, the lines become ragged and of uneven length. This is because of the presence of paragraph marks, called "hard" returns. Paragraph program removes these so that your pasted text will be properly wordwrapped in the new environment. There are 3 ways to format the paragraphs:

a. With blank line between paragraphs
b. Indentation of first lines of paragraphs (no blank line)
c. Both indentation and a blank line.
d. Additionally you can reduce multiple blank lines to just one blank line.

2. Inserting HTML Tags

You can add HTML tags to selected text for use in webpages, or for pasting into certain forum forms on the Internet which accept HTML tags (Like Rumor Mill News and Surfing the Apocalypse forums). The process is simple:

a. Select the text with the mouse cursor
b. Apply a tag by clicking a tag button ("Bold," "Italic," "H1," etc.)
c. Possibly click another tag button to add another attribute.
d. Each tag button puts the appropriate tag before and after the selected text
e. You can click another tag button to add multiple tags.
f. See explanation of these tags below.

Mass Tagging
You can also perform "mass tagging" which simply means to apply a certain set of HTML tags to a certain selected text wherever it appears in your document. This is useful for things like book titles or movie titles, or other special text which needs consistent formatting wherever it occurs. It is also useful for things like transcribed interviews where you want each person's name in bold each time they speak.

a. Click the "Apply Mass Tags" button
b. Check the tags you want to apply
c. Type in the text you want the tags to apply to.
d. If you select the text first it will appear in the edit box
e. Click the "Do Mass Tagging Now" button.
f. Click the "Test!" button to see how it worked

3. Testing Tags in Browser

You can see how your coded text will look by pressing the "Test!" button. This makes your text into a temporary ".htm" file and opens it in your default browser. It uses the last browser window that was open, or if none is open, it starts up the browser. By using the test button you can correct any errors that may creep in.

4. Cleaning Text and Swapping Characters

Sometimes when copying text from various sources strange characters may creep in. This is because they may have originally been from sources which used "high-bit" character for the apostrophe, or the quote marks. Paragraph lets you clean these out or replace them with the appropriate characters. There are two panels for this: Removing characters, and Replacing characters.

a. Removing characters

1. Click the "Characters" button and the Character panel will appear.
2. Check any number of characters for removal.
3. Click the "Clean Checked" button. The characters will be removed.
4. Since different fonts sometime have different "high bit" characters, you can change the fonts in the lists.

b. Replacing characters
1. From characters panel click the "Swap Chars" button
2. Now there are two lists, chars to replace, and what to replace them with.
3. Click a character in right list, then double click in left list with the character to replace it with.
4. Each character pair will be added to the two edit boxes at the bottom of the panel so you can see them.
5. (An alternate method is to just add the characters to the two edit boxes).
6. Click the "Do Replacements Now" button and the replacements will be done.

An example of replacement that is common is something pasted from a word processor which used high bit characters for the leading and trailing quotation marks. If you see this has happened, click on the high-bit character for the leading quote mark in the left list, and double-click the ordinary quote-mark in the right list, and do the same for the trailing high-bit quote mark. Then the high-bit quote marks will be replaced with ordinary quote marks, "cleaning" your document.

5. Other Features & Utilities

There are a number of other little features which operate on your text. More are being added as I write this! Here are some of them. Click the button "More Stuff" and you will see:

a. Strip extra lines between paragraphs. This enforces that there is one and only one blank line between paragraphs.
b. Alphabetize the lines in your file This applies to the paragraph as a whole, that is, the text is "un-wordwrapped" before this operation so the "lines" that are alphabetized are in fact the the paragraphs, each paragraph being a "line."
c. "Specify and remove chars" This is an alternate way to remove characters and is easiest when you want to remove typable characters rather than high-bit characters. Just type the characters you want to remove. It's especially handy when you are working with text from the "quoted" part of an Email which usually has a character like ">" at the head of each line.
d. Insert a separator line This lets you insert a line between sections of your document. You make it up by specify 1 or more chars to repeat, and the number of repetitions. This allows a great variety of line types. A typical one might be an equals char ("=") repeated 50 or 60 times.
e. Capitalization You can select a chunk of text and make it all capitals, all lower case, or "normalized," which means lower case with first letter of each sentence capitalized.
f. Search and Replace This is familiar. It works as it does in most word processors. Type the text you want to search for and what you want to replace it with. If you want to search for whole words only (not words within other words) check that box. Match case means just what it says.
g. Internet search features This program was originally written to help me write articles for Rumor Mill News forum, which often involved researching things as I went along, so if you are connected to the Internet there are several web search tools you can use. These are accessed by right-clicking when you are in the text window. First select a word or phase in your document you want to look up.

1. Merriam-Webster search. Often when writing you may want to check the meaning of a word, or its spelling. This looks up your selected word in the Merriam Webster online dictionary.
2. Google search feeds your selected text to the Google search engine and your browser will open the results.
3. Because I was using this for Rumor Mill News articles there are also searches specific to Rumor Mill News and Rense.com
h. Recent files list The program keeps track of the last ten files you had open. Right-click in the text window and choose "Recent Files" and then choose the file you want from the list and it will be opened.

6. Explanation of the HTML tags

The way that HTML tags work is fairly simple. It places a tag before your selected text, turning a given attribute ON, and another after your text turning it OFF. Here are examples of what happens to "Your selected text is here" when you click on the various tag buttons. These tags format your text when it is presented by a web browser.

Clicking the bold button:

Your selected text is here

Clicking the italic button ("em" means "emphasis") Your selected text is here

Clicking the underline button: Your selected text is here

Clicking the "S6" button (Largest font size):

Your selected text is here

Clicking the "Times" button sets the font to Times New Roman

Your selected text is here

Clicking the "Block" button will indent the selected text

<BLOCKQUOTE>Your selected text is here</BLOCKQUOTE>

Clicking the "Color" button lets you pick a color for your text, this is RED

Your selected text is here

Clicking the "Image" button lets you enter a web address (URL) to a picture on the web.

<img border="0" src="http://www.prahlad.org/links/ramana01.jpg"> 

Clicking the "Link Selected" button makes your text an Internet link to a URL you enter.

<A HREF="http://www.addressofsite.com/"> Your selected text is here </A>

Clicking "Break" forces the text to the next line.
 

Clicking "Paragraph" forces the text to a new paragraph (space between lines)


Click "Line" inserts a horizontal line (HR="horizontal rule")
<HR>

7. Special Search Tags

There are 4 special search tags you can apply to selected text. These make the selected text into a link to a Google search of the selected text. The user's browser will open with the search results. There is a general Google search, and searches specific to Rumor Mill News and Rense.com. You can also insert a search tag and specify any website and a link will be inserted to search just that website. These searches will search for the selected text by default, but you can edit the search terms fed to Google to make the search more exact. These special search tags can be a real boon to your readers by giving them a really quick way to get to other material regarding what you are writing about.

8. Using this Help File - it doubles as a scratch pad!

Because this program is quite simple, you will learn it fairly fast and probably not be needing this help file for long. So I made it possible to use it as a scratch pad. When writing articles I often want to quote some other article, so now you can load a file into the help file window, copy things from it into your main window, and save it (don't call it "parahelp.rtf"). Just right-click on the Helpfile window and choose "Load another file," and you can have that file available to copy stuff from into your main window. Perhaps there is a file you want to copy things from often. An example could be a file of boiler-plate responses for pasting into email, or a collection of statements or articles you are posting to many places on the web. In that case you can make a file you have loaded the default "Helpfile" which is loaded at startup.

NOTE: Remember throughout all your work that the shortcut for copying selected text is Ctrl-C, and the shortcut for pasting text is Ctrl-V. Also, Ctrl-A will select all the text in the window.

NOTE: To quickly close the Helpfile window, just click on it and then press the Escape key ("Esc").

Using the List tags

There are two kinds of lists: Ordered Lists (OL) and Unordered Lists (UL) In Unordered Lists the items are marked with bullets and in Ordered Lists the items are numbered in the order in which they occur. To make an ordered list, for example do this: 1. Click the "OL" button. You will see this inserted into your text:

<OL></OL>

2. Now press ENTER twice so it becomes this:

<OL>
</OL>

3. Now put the cursor on the line between the two tags and press the "LI" (List item) button. You will see this:

<OL>
<LI></LI>
</OL>

4. The cursor is placed just between the tags and you can simply type your first list item.

<OL>
<LI>Item Number One</LI>
</OL>

5. Now press END key and then ENTER key again and your will be ready to add your second item in the same way.

<OL>
<LI>This is the first item</LI>
<LI>Second item is here</LI>
<LI>Third item, and so on</LI>
<LI>Last item</LI>
</OL>

6. Keep adding items. When done you can press the "Test" button to see how it looks in a browser. It will look like this:

1. This is the first item
2. Second item is here
3. Third item, and so on
4. Last item