Quick Start


The benefits of using TextCon may not be immediately
apparent from reading the documentation. You can give
yourself a quick demonstration of its capabilities by using
TEXTCON.DOC as a sample ASCII file.

Start by loading the unmodified TEXTCON.DOC into your word
processor using the word processor's ASCII import command.
Browse through the document and you'll notice that it may
appear to be formatted correctly, but the "formatting" is
all created by use of hard returns and hard spaces. Try
editing parts of it and you'll quickly see the problems
caused by unwanted hard returns, extra blank spaces and
blank lines, and even headers and footers interspersed with
the text.

Then use TextCon to clean up TEXTCON.DOC. Since the file
has headers in it, you should use the /H option. For
Microsoft Word, Word Perfect, Displaywrite, XyWrite and
others, the complete command would be:

TEXTCON /H TEXTCON.DOC TEXTCON.TXT

For word processors such as MultiMate, Volkswriter, and PC-
Write, which cannot accept each paragraph as one long line
with no imbedded returns, use the command:

TEXTCON /H /KR TEXTCON.DOC TEXTCON.TXT

And for WordStar, use:

TEXTCON /H /R TEXTCON.DOC TEXTCON.TXT

Then import TEXTCON.TXT to your word processor, again using
its standard ASCII import command, and examine the results.
Notice how much cleaner the text is and how much less work
you have to do to reformat it or edit it. Much of the
formatting will be gone, but you'll see that it's much
easier to add your desired formatting to the converted file
than it is to work with the unconverted one.