This is for those of you who distribute a lot of jokes via e-mail.  I got tired of cleaning up all of the Unix reply marks ('>') and the lines that got chopped up by multiple word-wrapping.  So, I decided to write up a really quick 32-bit Windows application that does all of this for you.

Installation:
Just copy the file cleaner.exe onto your hard drive.  The easiest way, I've found, to use it is to create a shortcut to it on your desktop.  Then, right click on the shortcut, select properties, go to the Shortcut tab, and click in the Shortcut key box and type in a letter to use as your shortcut key.  This way, you only have to type in Ctrl-Alt-Key to bring up the cleaner.

To use it:
1) Copy the joke or list from your mail program to the clipboard as you always do.
2) Run the Cleaner application and hit either F1 or Alt-C or click on the Smiley Face icon.  The program pastes the joke from the clipboard, cleans up the text, and then copies the modified text back to the clipboard.
3) From there, go back to your mail program, open a new message and paste in the cleaned up message.

The actual changes that are made to the text are:
- Eliminates leading whitespaces and '>' characters.
- Ensures one and only one space between words and two spaces after each period.
- Combines lines that are in the same paragraph (so that sentences will be split up by word wrapping, instead of having a fixed width.)
- Doesn't concatenate sentences that start with numbers or bullet points.  (For numbered lists that don't end with periods...)
- If the first line is followed by a blank line, that line will be treated as a title and will not be combined with the next text line.

Notes:
* This program is freeware and is freely distributable.
* This is a Windows95/98/NT (Win32) only application.
* Some cleanup of the text will probably still be required, but The Cleaner should simplify things by quite a bit.
* The text cannot be larger than 32,000 characters, but that shouldn't really be a problem...
* This application was written using Borland C++'s ObjectWindows Library.

Well, enjoy!  If you have any comments or suggestions, just let me know...  Feel free to distribute this if you know anyone that might actually appreciate this program.
Steve Chin
schin@cs.stanford.edu
