How to format
ClipCollect aims to gather information quickly and easily, so formatting is secondary and should be automatic. But depending on the original format of the Clipboard contents, it might be impossible to automatically produce a well formatted text.
You have different options:
- Start with the default formatter [Tidy] and your second choice should be [Wrap].
- Try another paragraph width by selecting either [Wrap], [Tidy], [Pack] or [Press] twice, which will pop up a dialog box.
- Break up a text into single snippets and format them differently, if the text gets formatted poorly as a whole.
- As a last resort for hard cases take small snippets and [Press] them on their own. A text with paragraphs will result.
- Or take the whole text, [Press] it, insert blank lines with [edit] to hint for paragraphs and finally [Pack] it.
- Help the formatters [Tidy] or [Wrap] by editing the snippet before formatting it.
- Put in blank lines at paragraph boundaries
- Join lines, which the formatter hesitates to connect
- Change indentations of lines after a blank line or with a list marker
- Insert list markers in front of the first letter of a line: * + - · or 1) 2) 3) or 1. 2. 3.
- Edit and format alternately. To do so, it is best to edit only the last snippet. When [all] is deactivated every change in the editor will be silently saved once you press a formatting button and every formatting action will become binding once the editor saves. This is convenient and thus recommended, but a little care must be taken:
- Deactivate [all]
- Imagine the outcome, choose an appropriate formatting option and try to stay with it.
- Edit the text and then click e.g. [Tidy]
- If you are totally unsatisfied with the result you can revoke the formatting now by clicking [As is]. Otherwise repeat the last step as often as necessary.
- Format the whole text again (not only the formatting zone). Put the whole text back into the Clipboard with [Cut] and add it again to the input area with [=> paste].
- Example: If you want to delete all blank lines of the whole formatted text, recycle it through [Cut] [=> paste] [Deflate]
To see the formatting more closely at work have a look at some examples by clicking the right arrow
of the navigation bar at the top of this page.