Pastefix

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General Use

Pastefix is a brutish little utility that strips or converts non-ASCII characters out of UTF-8 and other fancy encodings in text selections from your clipboard so they can be pasted into old-school venues such as IRC. It has a few other IRC-related convenience functions, but primarily it is meant simply to clean up text pastes from heavily-formatted web pages, which can often cause problems for other users. Pastefix is also handy for easily stripping out text styling for pasting in normal applications - fonts, colors, italics, etc. will all be removed.

As an application, the behavior of Pastefix is somewhat strange -- it tries to stay out of your way as much as possible and perform everything it can automatically, so it bends some of the general Apple user interface conventions.

Normally it remains hidden, and you never see it until you want to clean up a chunk of text. You then bring Pastefix into focus by clicking on the Dock icon, using Alt-tab, or best of all, the global hotkey (which defaults to Command-Shift-c.) When you bring Pastefix into focus, it automatically copies and converts the contents of your clipboard and previews it for you. In most cases, this is all that needs to be done. You can simply press 'Save to Clipboard' (or Command-s) and Pastefix updates your clipboard with the sanitized text and disappears again. You can then safely paste.

So, the default "workflow" would look something like:

Split: If any of the lines in your text selection are longer than a configurable maximum, the 'Split' button activates. Pressing that button will break the too-long lines into shorter chunks. This is meant to help you prevent your pastes from being cut off by the nebulous IRC maximum line length limitation, which IRC clients are notoriously bad about calculating.

Refresh: If you edit the text in Pastefix, the 'Refresh' button will activate. This button will re-copy the clipboard text should you choose to discard your edits. If you switch away from Pastefix without saving your edits and come back later, it will still contain the edited text. If you want to discard that and load new clipboard contents, press Refresh.

Preferences

Autohide: This setting controls whether Pastefix automatically hides itself when it loses focus.

Check for Updates: Pastefix can automatically check for updated versions and download them for you. To disable that behavior, uncheck this setting.

Use Iconv library for transliterations: By default, Pastefix uses the GNU iconv library to attempt to gracefully transliterate strange characters into reasonable ASCII equivalents. If you disable this option, it will be considerably more aggressive in downsampling text. For example, 'é' will simply become 'e', and most web dingbats will be stripped entirely.

Maximum line length: This is the setting that controls when Pastefix thinks a line is too long to paste into IRC. This number is based on the general IRC maximum message buffer length, subtracting: 2 x average nick length, a few characters of protocol overhead, a general guess as to the average target name length, and an even wilder guess about average hostname length. You may need to tweak this setting if any of those values deviate for you. Do be aware that this real limit will still vary somewhat based on the name of the entity to which you are sending your messages, so it is best to err on the side of caution.

Activation hotkey: This is the keystroke registered globally that causes Pastefix to steal focus. It defaults to Command-Shift-c because that seems pretty convenient to hit right after copying some text, but you can set it to whatever you want.