I fancy myself almost an expert on hierarchical clip managersócould there be a more ridiculous-sounding subject for expertise? Anyway, despite the tons of trivia I know about clip managers, I just discovered one that beats all of them. It has a feature set roughly co-extensive with ClipMate and it copies a lot of ClipMateís approach, but the interface is much cleaner and most importantly, it actually works consistently, even in the face of other applications vying for the clipboard. I think this may be because in its inner workings it separates pasting from the Windows clipboard.

It does cost $10 more than ClipMate. The program is called AceText by JGSoft, who also make the text editor EditPad Pro, if that means anything to anyone. AceText integrates with EditPad, which I think is a pretty gutsy move for a small company. Oh, one thing I forgot to mention, like EditPad, AceText only does plain text. (Note your reaction.)

The thing that really surprises me is that I donít find the absence of formatting a draw back. Formatting today is probably best accomplished by using styles attached to document templates in your word processor of choice. Anything you store as text awaits instant formatting, if you have good style sheets set up.

I imagine that the flawless operation operation of AceText, as contrasted with the inevitably glitchy performance of other productsówell, itís my hunch, someone like Alex who actually knows something may disconfirmóthis flawless performance canít be obtained merely by a program almost completely free of bugs. Many of the glitches occur when handly formatted text. Plain text seems so much more tractable, just in terms of a zero failure rate for copying.

Iím not a Zoot user. I canít think of any use I would have for processing rules, and I don't work with tons of data. But Iíve admired its prowess second-hand. Everyone assumes that its future lies in rich text, but Iím led to wonder if its abilities donít depend on the medium.

Iím also led to wonder whether BrainStorm is making the right choice in featuring rich text in the projected Pro edition. As styles and templates further permeate the culture of word processing, in my present mood Iím inclined to predict a renaissance of plain text.

Stephen R. Diamond

There is definitely something to be said for plain text. As someone who frequently uses PageMaker to create brochures and catalogs, I find that one of the first things I do when getting copy from another person is to turn it into plain text, then import it into PageMaker. That way all the junk formatting that inevitably comes with RTF or Word documents is cleansed. This usually saves time, even though I have to go back through and add italics and bold formats where they may already have existed. For this process, I usually use NoteTab Light, although Zoot is good at this as well.

Now that I've found a good substitute for InfoSelect (UltraRecall) for storing formatted materials, I find myself less eager for Zoot to become RTF compatible. Some information, however, can be much more valuable when it can be parsed with highlighting (color highlighting or bolding), and as bulleted information.

My hope is that when Zoot is finally ported to 32-bit mode and has RTF formatting, that it can be an option for any individual note. If you look at Jarte, for instance, you will see that you can set any one document to be plain text or rich format, and can set a default mode. This would be very handy in Zoot (or any PIM, for that matter). Also, having the option to export RTF text as plain text, would also be valuable.

So, Stephen, I agree that plain text is not dead... on the contrary, it is a valuable format and programs that now handle it deftly, should not neglect it as they add RTF.

Steve Z.

Equations in plain text are not very pretty.