gHacks technology news » documents

View Documents Online With Google Docs Viewer

Martin — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 11:08:01 +0000

Google Docs Viewer is a new online service by the Google Docs team that makes it possible to view document like Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint directly in the web browser. The advantage of this option is that it is no longer required to download the document to the local computer system to view it. There are obviously other services that offer a similar functionality like the Firefox add-on Open It Online. The main difference is that Google Docs Viewer is not limited to a specific plugin, web browser or software.

There are two options on how to use Google Docs Viewer:

The first option is to visit the Google Docs Viewer website. All it takes to view a document online is to paste its url into the web form at the page.

This will then display three links that can be pasted and embedded into websites. Probably the most interesting option is to view the document directly online.

This will open the document on a new page.

The second option is even simpler than that. All it takes is to append the url of the document to the basic Google Docs Viewer url:

http://docs.google.com/gview?url=

This will only display the document on a new page. The links to embed the document are not displayed with this method. Google Docs Viewer offers an interesting option to uses who want to quickly view a document without having to download it. It can also be helpful if no viewer for the document type is available on the local computer system.

Tags: documents, Google, google docs, google docs viewer, view documents online

Published Google Docs Documents To Appear In Google Search

Martin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 08:15:23 +0000

How would you announce a major change to a product that is likely going to affect a large userbase? Probably not in the same way that Google announced upcoming changes to their popular document management and editing platform Google Docs. In a recent post at the Google Docs Help Forum Marie, a Google employee, notified users of an upcoming change to Google Docs.

Google plans to index all published documents from Google Docs users if the documents are linked from a public (that means crawled by Google Bot) website. What this means is that Google Docs users might find their documents in the Google index even if they never had the intention for this.

The main problem with the procedure is the following: Google Docs users cannot explicitly block their documents from being indexed. Even worse is the fact that there is not an option to see if their documents have been publicly linked.

Only documents that have been explicitly published by selecting the ‘Publish as web page’ or ‘Publish/embed’ option and are linked from a public accessible website will be indexed by Google Search. The only option at this point in time is to undo this from the same menu.

A click on the Stop Publishing button will prevent that the document will be indexed in Google Search. It will also mean on the other hand that the document will no longer be accessible if it has been linked from a website.

Tags: documents, google docs, google docs indexing, google docs public, google docs publish, google search

Google Docs Batch Uploader

Martin — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:37:36 +0000

Google Docs is a popular document hosting and editing service on the Internet. Part of its popularity stems from the fact that Google account owners can use it without having to register at yet another website and the integration with other Google services like Gmail. One problem that only some users encounter when using Google Docs is the lack of a batch uploading feature to upload multiple documents at once.

The free Java application Google Docs Upload solves this for some by offering a command line driven option to upload as many documents as needed in one go to the Google documents website. The only requirement is that the Java Runtime Environment is installed on the computer system that is being used to upload the documents to Google Docs.

Usage itself is pretty straightforward. The command

java -jar google-docs-upload-1.0.jar --username --password

for example will upload all documents to Google Docs that are located in the specified path. Several parameters are available like the recursive command that will include documents that are located in subfolders in the upload to the Google documents website. One advantage of a command line driven tool is the ability to use it in scripts or programs to automate the uploading process to Google Docs. It is probably not a tool for the average Google Docs user but could be very handy for businesses who use the service. via Google Operating System

Tags: documents, Google, google docs, google docs upload, google docs uploader, google documents

Document Management Software DocShield

Martin — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 07:59:02 +0000

A friend of mine had a very recent and unpleasant experience. He wanted to format an USB stick, picked the wrong drive letter and formatted his encrypted USB flash drive instead. All data gone without a chance to restore them as he did not have a recovery option. This is probably an extreme scenario but there are many cases where documents and files can become unavailable including hard drive failures, computer virus attacks or human error.

The document management software DocShield has been designed to protect the most important documents from these kind of errors. It looks like a backup software on first glance but it is actually more than that. DocShield can monitor document file types like doc, xls or txt in multiple directories that are available on a specific computer system. It is highly flexible and offers the possibility to add file extensions that should be monitored to the interface. The main window offers the additional option to add single documents or groups of documents from a folder to the document management program.

These directories are monitored in intervals and document snapshots are created whenever the document change. These snapshots can be stored in multiple locations and packed to save storage space. A password can be assigned to secure the document archives.

The number of snapshots and a maximum file size per document archive with options to prompt for action if the limits are reached can be defined in the settings of Doc Shield as well. Event notifications either come in the form of a message box or email if a SMTP server is configured by the user. One interesting option is to automatically copy these document backups to a ftp server. Data can be moved manually to an USB device which will not only copy the documents but also a portable viewer that can be used to view archive contents and open documents.

The document management system offers an extensive log and overview of all the documents that have been backed up in the past. These documents can be opened or extracted to the local computer system.

DocShield can protect documents. The option to automatically move the backups to a server and the USB viewer make it an excellent tool for many occasions. The document management software is compatible with most Microsoft operating systems including Windows XP and Windows Vista. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 and is free for personal use.

Tags: backup software, docshield, document backups, document management, document management software, document management system, document snapshots, documents

Google Docs Adds Document Translations

Martin — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:36:37 +0000

Offering computer translations of documents seems to be a one of the features that Google wants to introduce in many of their services. You might remember that they have added automatic translations of RSS feed items in Google Reader a while ago. A super useful feature for users who follow foreign blogs. A few days ago document translations were added to Google Docs as well which allows users of the document hosting and managing service to translate documents that are available in Google Docs easily.

The new option to translate a document becomes available after clicking on Tools > Translate Document in the header menu while viewing a single document in Google Docs.

Available is the usual assortment of languages that is offered by the Google Translate service. Selecting one of the languages in the menu will open a new window that displays the translated text after a short time. It is then possible to create a new document based on the translated document or replace the existing document with the translation.

The document cannot be edited in this window though. This option becomes available after selecting one of the two options described above. It would have been nice if Google Docs offered at least some form of export and editing capabilities right away so that users who want a quick translation of a document can process it further without having to save it first before they can do so.

Another option that is currently missing are partial translations of documents. It’s currently either all or nothing.

source official Google Docs Blog

Tags: document hosting, documents, Google, google docs, google documents, google translate, translate documents

Doc Update Lists Document Updates

Martin — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:35:24 +0000

Doc Update is a brand new software program that has been uploaded to Sourceforge recently. The Open Source tool can be used to display document updates not only from the active user account but also from other user accounts of the operating system. It is not totally clear how these information are fetched and if a certain user level is required to access these information. The Doc Update website has not been uploaded yet and there is virtually no help file or readme that could shed some light into the darkness.

The software program will display the personal documents upon startup. Personal documents are those found in the user’s My Documents folder of the Windows operating system. It will list all documents with their names, modification dates, owners and directories they are stored in.

The documents can be sorted by the same parameters and opened by double-clicking them. A search form on top makes it possible to search for documents containing the search term in their title. It is currently not possible to search the document’s contents as well.

A click on the context pulldown menu makes it possible to change the view to display everyone’s documents, program files or the internet cache instead. The same options apply to these selections as well. Doc Update is available in an early version which might be the reason for the lack of information. The program does take relatively long to display the documents in the table as well. The program might already be useful for some users who need to keep track of document updates made by co-workers.

Tags: doc update, docs, document updates, documents, Open Source, updated documents, windows software

Free OCR Scanning

Martin — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:41:16 +0000

If you are looking for an online service that offers free OCR scanning then you might want to point your web browser to the Free Online OCR service. The service allows users to upload images that will then be processed immediately. The OCR scanning does not take longer than a few seconds after uploading the image. Results are immediately shown in a text form on the same page from where they can be copied and pasted into other software programs or services.

The free OCR scanning service supports PDF, JPG, GIF, TIFF or BMP files with a maximum file size of two Megabytes. The OCR currently supports the six languages English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Dutch.

Best results are achieved if the images have a dpi setting of at least 150. That’s problematic when taking screenshots as these usually are taken at a lower value.

Results range from impressive to workable and it is a good idea to check the recognized text and correct any errors made during the OCR scan. Free OCR has a few additional limitations that are mentioned in the faq on the website. Probably the two biggest restrictions are a one page limitation when scanning pdf documents and that it will not recognize document layouts which means that a two column layout will be processed as a single column layout.

The developers of Free OCR promised to update their service in the near future to remove these restrictions and limitations. Thanks go to JoJo for sending in the tip.

Tags: documents, free ocr, images, ocr, ocr scanner, ocr scanning, ocr service, online service

Google Docs Backup Software

Martin — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:04:54 +0000

It is essential to have a solid backup strategy in place with cloud storage space becoming more popular. While many users run backup software on their local computer system to backup important data only a few take care that uploaded data is also regularly backed up.

The reason for this is that many users believe that the data is safe on Internet servers. A lot can happen that can put the data on those servers at risk. This ranges from hacking attempts, hardware failures that cause data loss or bankruptcy. It is therefor essential to make sure that data that is stored online is backed up regularly.

We have already mentioned how to backup Gmail before should be essential for every Gmail user. While it is unlikely that Gmail will be discontinued there have been times where the service was not accessible. Having a backup of the data would make it possible to access the emails anyway.

Google Docs Backup is another Windows backup software that can be used to backup one of the popular Google services. Users can use it to backup all documents on their local computer system that they have uploaded to Google Docs. Usage of the backup software has been simplified. All that needs to be done is to enter the username and password of the Google Docs account and to select a directory on the local computer where the data should be downloaded to.

A few optional settings are available. It is for example possible to select the output format for each document type and to route the traffic through a proxy server. A click on the Exec button will initiate the data backup which can take some time depending on the size of the data stored at Google Docs and the connection speed.

Gdoc Backup (via To The PC) is a free software program for the Windows operating system.

Tags: backup, backup software, documents, Google, google docs, google docs backup, software, windows backup, windows software

Desktop Search Engine DocFetcher

Martin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:37:10 +0000

DocFetcher is a document search engine that, unlike prominent desktop search engines such as Google Desktop Search or Everything, is best suited for indexing and managing document formats only. Most document types are supported starting with plain text documents to scripting languages such as html or php to Microsoft Office formats like doc and xls but also the Office 2007 variants docx and pptx plus formats of Office alternatives such as Open Office or Abiword documents.

Another difference between DocFetcher and other desktop search engines is that the former was designed to index document folders only and not an entire hard drive. This means that the initial setup of the document search engine is more time consuming as the user has to point the application to specific folders on the computer’s hard drive that contain the documents that should be indexed by the program.

The advantage of this method is that the program uses less system resources and is able to offer a better result quality. A few options are available to filter the result list. It is possible to specify a minimum and maximum file size, select some or all of the supported file types and locations that have been indexed by the desktop search tool.

Search results are displayed in the same interface with their title, size, filename, type, path, author, modification date and score that is computed by DocFetcher. A left-click on any document will load a preview of the document’s contents in a preview area in the interface which is great for accessing information of documents quickly as the search term is highlighted in the preview of the document.

DocFetcher (via Essential Freebies) comes as an installer or portable version for the Windows and Linux operating systems. It requires Java to be installed on the computer system.

Tags: desktop search, desktop search engine, docfetcher, document search, documents, google desktop search, java, linux software, search engine, windows software

Universal Document Viewer

Martin — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:51:48 +0000

We reviewed the document viewer TextMaker Viewer 2009 a while ago. It was a program that could display the contents of various document formats like the popular pdf, txt and doc formats but also newer formats used by Microsoft Office 2007 and the latest version of Open Office. While it did provide a nice way to open all of these formats without having to install an Office suite it lacked behind in usability and more importantly speed.

Universal Viewer is another application that will suite many more needs. It has not only been designed to open document formats but also other formats like images and photos, multimedia files like videos or audio and Internet files like htm or xml. The program is driven by plugins that add support for various file types. The plugins are the same that are used by Total Commander which ensures the availability of many plugins for various file formats.

Universal Viewer is a viewer that displays the information in a basic but highly accessible fashion. Only the main information are shown without additional formatting. Take a look at a comparison between the same document in Microsoft Word 2007 and Universal Viewer:

Universal Viewer is therefor a basic viewer that can display pretty much any format that can be displayed visually. It comes with the following feature set:

Full support for Unicode filenames
Built-in functions of several popular plugins: images, multimedia, webpages view
Support for multiple codepages: ANSI, OEM, EBCDIC, ISO, KOI8, Mac etc.
Toolbar, status bar, other interface improvements
Auto-reloading of file on changing, “Follow tail” option
Displaying of line numbers
Displaying of non-printable characters
Combined Unicode/Hex mode (call Unicode mode twice)
More modern RegEx search library
Print preview
EXIF viewer

Some of the more commonly used plugins, for example to display Microsoft Office 2007 documents are linked from the developers homepage directly while others can be found on Total Commander plugin websites which are also linked there. Plugins can be added directly from within Universal Viewer.

Universal Viewer itself can be downloaded as a portable version or installer. The developer offers a Pro version of the viewer as well which adds several new features to the application.

Verdict:

Universal Viewer is a fast and lightweight document viewer that can be used to quickly look at the contents of virtually any files on the computer system.

Tags: document viewer, documents, file viewer, portable software, universal viewer, windows software

Open XML Docx Viewer

Martin — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:32:13 +0000

The introduction of the new Microsoft Office XML formats (docx, pptx, xlsx) have caused some confusion by users of previous Microsoft Office releases as their versions were not able to open the new document formats by default. The same was true for users without access to any version of Microsoft Office 2007. Several ways to open docx files have emerged pretty soon after the initial release; One of them is the Open XML Viewer which is basically offered as a plugin for the web browser Firefox.

The document viewer only supports the new docx file format at this point but as this is the most commonly encountered format it should suffice for the moment. The web browser add-on is available for both the Windows and Linux operating system and supplied as a xpi file which can be loaded and installed easily. Another version for the command line of both operating systems is provided as well.

The web browser plugin works by simply dragging and dropping docx documents into a Firefox tab or window. The add-on will automatically process the document and display it in the web browser. There is currently no direct way to open docx files that are linked from websites but it is possible to associate the Firefox web browser with the docx format in the operating system to either open the documents automatically or on right-click and selection with it.

The next installment of the Open XML Document Viewer is slated for a April 2009 release which will add support for the Opera and Internet Explorer web browser, server side support, document themes and drawing shapes.

Tags: document, documents, docx, firefox, firefox docx, firefox-add on, web browser, xml

Document Presentation For Websites

Martin — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 10:18:39 +0000

There is not really a standard out there for document presentation on websites. Many webmasters rely on widgets and scripts to display documents on their websites making it sometimes confusing for their visitors who have to deal with documents that they can only download and various interfaces for document presentations on the website itself.

Doc Shots tries to bring in more control to the webmaster by allowing them to present documents on their websites easily. The visitor be able to view a selected document right on the website in an overlay that is providing basic controls such as being able to download, print, search and zoom the document at hand. It feels like a document viewer on the web and resembles desktop document viewers enough to make it easy for visitors to use it.

Webmasters have to be registered users of the service before they can configure the service for their website. Registration is free on the other hand and not problematic or time consuming at all. The configuration of the document presentation script can be customized by setting the width and height of the overlay window. Other options include the display of related items and document storing policies.

Webmasters receive a JavaScript code in the end that they have to embed into their website to make use of the document presentation engine. The script will automatically recognize popular document formats such as .doc, .pdf, .ppt, .xls. Hoovering over document links or clicking on the documents will open the document presentation overlay on the same website.

The first viewer will experience a small delay while opening the document as the conversion is initiated at that time. It is therefor a good idea to be the first viewer so that regular visitors do not experience the delay. Visitors can still right-click the document and save it to their computer system directly.

Tags: document, document presentation, documents, javascript, script, view documents, webmasters, websites

Use Notepad++ Without Sessions

Martin — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 10:47:48 +0000

The Notepad replacement Notepad++ is storing sessions by default. This means that a user opening a supported document in Notepad++ is also seeing the documents of the last sessions in the tabs on top. This feature can be handy if a user works with the same documents most of the time; It can on the other hand be a privacy risk and some users might want to turn of sessions in Notepad++ to eliminate the risk.

Disabling sessions from Notepad++ should not have any impact on other software features like the tabbed interface. The option to disable sessions in Notepad++ can be found in the options of the software program.

A user opening Notepad++ can open the program’s options by selecting Settings from the main menu and Preferences from the submenu. The Preferences window is opening which is displaying several tabs and lots of options.

Locate the Misc tab of the Preferences menu and uncheck the “Remember the current session for next launch” box to disable the session feature in Notepad++.The user will only see the current document the next time Notepad++ is opened. New documents are still added in tabs during a session but once Notepad++ gets closed the information are erased.

Tags: documents, notepad, notepad replacement, notepad++ tips, text, text files

ODF Addins For Microsoft Office Suite

Martin — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:18:27 +0000

The Microsoft Office Suite is currently not supporting the Open Format (ODF), a file format for spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Most users will probably have come in contact with the Open Format in Open Office which fully supports the format.

The most common file names are .odf for word processing documents and .ods for spreadsheets. If you encounter such a file and want to open it in the Microsoft Office Suite you will notice that it is not possible. Instead of downloading another Office suite you could instead install the ODF addins for the Microsoft Office Suite which add support for the office software programs Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Powerpoint which means support for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations and the file formats .odt (documents), .ods (spreadsheets) and .odp (presentations).

After installing the Open XML / ODF Translator addins in the Microsoft Office Suite users can not only open but also save Open Document Formats. Supported are the Microsoft Office Suites Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP.

Tags: addins, documents, microsoft office suite, odf converter, office, software, spreadsheets

Use The Computer To Fill Out Paper Forms

Martin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 19:22:10 +0000

It looks much nicer and is better readable if a paper form is filled out by using a type writer or computer printer. The person who is working with the filled out paper forms will thank you if you do it that way. I once had to check and process thousands of paper forms that were send by post and fax to my office and it was sometimes horrendous to decipher the handwriting.

Nedjosoft Paperform is a free application that can be used to fill out paper forms with a computer. The document has to be available digitally so that it can be processed by the software, this can be achieved by scanning a paper form or download a digital version right away.

The program works basically by loading so called pages into it. Pages are images with the jpg, png, bmp or gif file extension. The user can then switch to edit mode once an image has been loaded into the software.

Fields can be added to the image which can later be filled out by the user. There are two basic types of fields: text fields and check boxes.

Both fields are divided further. Text boxes can be single or multi lined and aligned to the left, center or right while check boxes can have various forms as well. Each field can be placed exactly on the image so that they match the form fields perfectly.

Once all fields have been added to the image the digital form can be saved and filled out.

Tags: documents, electronic forms, forms, paper form, papers, software

Acrobat.com Online

joshua — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:10:50 +0000

Adobe recently released a new set of office applications online to compete with the dominant Google Docs, Zoho and possibly Windows Office Live.

It was released alongside Adobe Flash9 and received a small amount of coverage, so I decided to have a quick look at what it offered.

Acrobat.com contains 5 services, 3 of which previously existed as Adobe Buzzword (Word Processing), Adobe Brio (Collaboration) and Adobe Share (File sharing). Acrobat doesn’t offer a complete office suite replacement as the lack of spreadsheets and presentations are a notable omission.

Instead Acrobat.com provides a way to create, publish, share, collaborate on and discuss documents with other people. In fact it does this better then any other free online service I can think of, although it’s worth remembering this is still a beta release so expect some issues.

Aside from the three services mentioned Acrobat also has My Files which is a file manager with a generous 5 gigabytes and Create PDF which can convert up to 5 files at a time into Adobe PDF. A 200mb limit is imposed but that shouldn’t be too much of an issue. It supports all major formats (Microsoft Office, Open Office, Star Office and image files).

For me the best feature is the AIR application for desktop access, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support offline synchronisation and access.

I’m going to keep using Google Docs for now but I think this will definitely be one to watch.

Tags: acrobat, adobe, documents, office

Notepad++ 5.0 beta

Martin — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:05:13 +0000

Notepad++ has been my Notepad replacement for the last years and I have never looked back since I installed it on my first computer. It combines the speed and low resource usage of Notepad with an advanced functionality that includes syntax highlighting, plugins and multi-views.

Today the first beta version of Notepad++ 5.0 was released to the public on Sourceforge, more than 18 months after the release of Notepad++ 4.0. It offers further performance improvements over previous versions, bookmarked lines, different colored tabs, plugin commands in the context menu and additional options to configure the application.

The announcement lists 18 fixed bugs and features that have been added in Notepad++ 5.0, they are:

1. Improve Notepad++ performance – on startup and on exit.
2. Add Calltip capacity.
3. All the menu commands can be added in context menu, including plugins’ commands, macros and user defined commands.
4. Add bookmarked lines operations : delete all marked lines, copy all marked lines into clipboard, cut all marked lines into clipboard, paste from clipboard to replace all marked lines content.
5. Fix crash bug : Open files with date pre-1970.
6. Fix clone mode bug : now the actions done in one view will be synchronized in the cloned view.
7. Add tooltips in document tab to display the full file name path.
8. Change hide lines behaviour : Hide lines now saved during switches.
9. Change file history list behaviour : Most recent closed file is on the top. Add number on list.
10. Caret width and blink rate are customizable.
11. Add asterisk in title bar if file is dirty.
12. The bookmarks’ look & feel are improved.
13. Add “Select all” and “copy” context menu items in Find in files results window.
14. Fix goto line with command line bug.
15. Improve smart highlight / mark all / incremental search highlight all visibility
16. Tabbar’s coulours is configurable via Stylers Configurator(Active tab Text, Inactive tab text, Inactive tab background, Active tab focused indicator and Active tab unfocused indicator).
17. Add the smart highlight file size limit – 1.5 MB in order to improve the performance.
18. Add exception handling (dumping filedata)

The complete announcement can be read in the Notepad++ forum and the new version can be downloaded directly from Sourceforge.

Tags: documents, notepad, text

Open Office Extensions

joshua — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 16:00:07 +0000

Open Office recently pushed 3.0 as a beta release.

It’s a bit slower the 2.4, it’s got a nice new start centre, an icon refresh, a zoom control on the status bar and is now capable of supporting extensions to increase functionality.

To be honest I can’t say there are a great many useful downloads available at the moment, but some of them would be pretty handy if you use Open Office on a regular basis:

Professional Template Pack
A collection of elements to create your own professional style templates for documents, forms and presentations

Sun Web Blog Publisher
Microsoft Word 2007 comes with some impressive blogging capabilities, but now Writer can too. This extension supports “many popular blog services’”, so having not used it I can’t guarantee it’ll work for yours, but give it a try and see.

GoogleDocs to Open Office.
This works for both Google Docs and Zoho and can import and export your documents and presentations between Open Office and thestwo online services.

Oxygen Office Gallery Extras
A compilation of clip art and templates for your documents. Comes with multiple languages and with some other extras.

Pagination
A simple little dialogue to insert page numbers, works with all localizations.

Crop Images
Crop images in Draw and Impress with this add-on.

Writer’s Tools
If you live in Writer during the day, churning out documents or whatever it is you do then this pack will provide you with all the extra functions and features necessary. There are some pretty useless additions to this set, but some notable tools are:

Lookup Tool
Email Backup
Remote Backup
Start/Stop Timer
Add to Basket
miniInvoices

Test Fonts
This seems pretty handy, it searches for all the fonts contained in the document on your system. It then reports on missing fonts, all used fonts and gives statistics on available fonts.

Tags: documents, extensions, open office extensions, open office tips, open-office, word

Find and Replace text across multiple documents

Martin — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 09:24:13 +0000

A colleague of mine build a static html website a few years ago. He slowly but steadily created hundreds of html pages which was great for him because he could simply use one already finished file as a template for a new one. It did however pose a problem as well. Updating information across all files was very time consuming. Think of extending the copyright notice each year, adding advertisement to the websites or changing the navigation.

What he obviously needs is a program that can find and replace text across multiple documents. Ideally it would be a software that would be easy to use and would require just a few clicks to achieve the desired results. One of the applications that can deliver a speedy way of replacing text across multiple documents is Text Crawler.

Ideally you only need to fill out the old and new text, the location of the documents and the type of documents that you want to change. Text Crawler scans all documents of that type for the phrase that you have entered and displays all occurrences in a list that contains the file name and location as well as the line in the document with the match.

The text is only replaced in files checked by the user. Some of the supported file types are txt, log, php, htm, css and ini. What I like is the option to create backup files before replacing the text in the documents and support for Regular Expressions. A great feature is the Regular Expression Tester that allows you to load a text file and test if the regular expression is replacing the text correctly.

The process itself is very fast, takes just a short time to replace the text in the selected documents.

Tags: documents, replacer, scan-text, software, text, text crawler, Windows

Combine Text Documents

Martin — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:22:31 +0000

My old hoster had the habit of providing me with 20 Megabyte log file chunks that I could download to my computer. I did run a great forum back then that had lots of traffic and I always had to download several log files and combine them when they were downloaded on my computer. That’s one practical use for the software TxtCollector which combines text documents found in folders and subfolders that the user specifies.

The author of the software used it to combine reports that he received at work. Having one file instead of many has some advantages. It’s pretty obvious for log files but it also provides a better way of handling files when you look at the report example. It is easier to search inside one document than it is to search in several documents, it’s also easier to keep an overview.

Using TxtCollector is not difficulty. Just select a folder with text documents that you want to merge, check or uncheck the Include Subfolders option, select if you want to use a separator or not and click on the Combine All Files button.

The application runs on all Windows operating systems starting with Windows 95 and including Windows Vista.

Tags: documents, merge logs, merge text, software, Windows

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