BOBEMBRY  Performs functions that are useful to me. I use it multiple times per day.

Services menu operations are extremely convenient.

Combine Menu Master from Unsanity (to assign keystrokes to a service menu item) with a QuicKeys toolbar to execute the keystroke to have a text cleaning system within applications such as Scrivener, Mori or DEVONthink Pro.

Give it a test drive

Bob

Adventures in time: http://homepage.mac.com/bobembry/free/

Blog: http://homepage.mac.com/bobembry/iblog/  
(Version 5.7)

PDXMPH  I've been using TextSoap for work for some time now. I'm an editor dealing with an international bullpen that submits material in all sorts of formats and encodings. A big part of my job is normalizing text before editing it for content & style and handing it off to a CMS.

TextSoap was great when it provided nothing more than a GUI for some useful text transformations, but when the developer added regular expression support, it became something I don't want to be without. I can draw on a lot of the knowledge I earned on the Unix command line with tools like sed to handle the edge cases TextSoap's numerous out-of-the-box filters can't.

When TextSoap can't handle something specific, it's trivial to drop it into a larger AppleScript, because it has a clean, usable syntax for doing its thing in that context. If you can't do it in TextSoap but can do it with Perl, sed or similar, handling it with "do shell script" then handing the result off to TextSoap for its much easier AppleScript text processing works like a charm.

I probably use TextSoap 20 or 25 times a day, often to condense workflows that would take several minutes and be much more error prone into just a few seconds.

I could handle a lot of stuff TextSoap does with a little thought, a few raids on CPAN, and a lot of hacking. TextSoap saves me that trouble, and it has paid for itself in terms of time saved on an almost weekly basis for years.

Great tool. Great fusion of Mac simplicity with more powerful Unix idioms. The developer is responsive if something doesn't work, and he answers mail quickly, always looking for a way to help fix or explain things.

For a text-munger like me, who'd prefer to concentrate on content instead of fiddling, TextSoap is indispensable.

The one thing I'm waiting on and hoping for is some sort of interface with external Unix pipes. The developer said he's looking into it. Even if he never implemented that, I'd still be very happy with his product.  
(Version 5.5.2)

BUSHPHOTO  As a Stock Photographer with a million plus images to maintain, dealing with text efficiently is a must! I had thousands of images previously keyworded as NOT-CAPITALIZED and found TextSoap an invaluable tool to CHANGE all my keywords to CAPITALIZED to more comply with industry norms. Their Tech Support is phenomenal. Even helping us work through the hurdles to to use TextSoap within an existing software that was not as compliant as most.

Having TextSoap for this project alone saved dozens of hours re-entering data correctly. TextSoap has CLEANERS that can handle many such text transformations with one button click. AND tremendous flexibility cleaning text outside of the program as well.

I'm using it's on the fly ability to clean up text as I type this review and from my email and other programs as well. TWO THUMBS UP!!  
(Version 5.5.1)

ALANR  Since there have been very few reviews lately I'll pipe up.

TextSoap is one of my top three or four most used apps, but probably not for the most obvious reasons. I use TextSoap's service menu items almost constantly. I have defined many special TextSoap Cleaners and it's easy to add them to the Services menu.

I also use QuicKeys and the QuicKeys menus, often with special menus for each major app. TextSoap therefore allows me to have one button clicks to perform all sorts of text manipulations almost instantly and these are extremely useful when communicating of the web. For all my browsers I have a one button click which copies selected text into TextSoap for manipulation, enhancement and checking.

I also find that I use TextSoap pretty much as a replacement for TextEdit, pretty much only using T.E. when it's the default app for some file type. This review was written using TextSoap.

I realize that it may seem pricey but when I use it as much as I do that's not such an issue.  
(Version 5.5.1)

HANK2  I did take the upgrade and continue to be happy with it; I still want a much simpler interface

(like, a list of all the characters found in a document in one column, and next to it, all the guesses the programmer's made for substitution;

let me tick off what to replace with, or type in if there's no good guess, then run it.

Or, go to the first unrecognized character, give me the list of possible corrections or a place for one, let me add context to make it more specific, and run it on all, then go to the next ....

It's still maddeningly hard to clean up text and leave an editable file; reading mostly on a PDA, I find it hard still to get an output file, even after the automatic cleanup, I don't know any way to output directly to a Palm readable file that can still be edited.

Instead I use say PorDiBle, going from Mac text to Palm document file. But it's no more helpful about quickly cleaning up problems, it just says "something" is unrecognized.

Tiresome. Go find it (sigh), try again (sigh).

I had an old, old Mac or DOS app that did text conversions nicely long ago.  
(Version 5.5.1)

GRYPHONENT  I too will skip that upgrade for the same reasons as mentioned in earlier posts by other readers. Though I’ve been a loyal user since version 4 I too find that version 5 is not worth the steep upgrade price of $16 for the standard and $21 for the deluxe version. Not sure what the developer’s been smoking when coming up with this new pricing scheme.

I’m also outraged about being “forced” to register the deluxe version if I want to keep certain features that were present already in version 4. That’s called downgrading, not upgrading. I use textSoap once in a while... it’s a nice, small utility, but much as PopChar Pro and other one-trick ponies the pricing levels need to be adjusted.  
(Version 5.0)

FLASH1296  Extremely useful.

Usefriendly

Elegantly simplistic interface.  
(Version 4.2.1)

UNMARKED SOFTWARE  Please note: there is a known bug in v4.0.3. If you select text that does not contain at least one carriage return, you will experience a freeze of the application you used textSOAP in.

The work-around for this is to simply make sure you have at least one carriage return in the text being cleaned.

This issue will be addressed in the next update.  
(Version 4.0.3)

BOB  This needs a 'b' in the version name...

What I did:

Select text in BBedit, hit 'capitalize' in Text Soap, force quit the frozen BBedit, trash Text Soap.

This is an app I'd like to like but this is pitiful.  
(Version 4.0.3)

GRIZZLY  This program has once again saved my bacon on so many occasions that I forget it's there until I need it and then it works!

This OS X implementation is a great improvement over the 9's. I've been using this program for years and have great success where everything else just plain didn't get consistency.

I highly recommend this for anyone who has funky characters showing up and needs to get things back into some order. The window to work in is a real simple, yet very powerful tool to see what is going on. Making your own set of 'Cleaners', which are a very powerful set of 'actions', is so much easier in this OS X release that I just regained all my confidence in going out and fetting my feet wet in teh Wild Wooly World again.

GREAT support and a fantastic ongoing development, not just 'future-speak'.

Try it out, it's worth the bucks.  
(Version 4.0.3)