SEAR
Setext. All pretty-like.
There are a lot of different ways to store and transmit text. Lots of systems use lots of different methods, some suited better for the web, some better suited only for use with certain applications. A specific format, setext, can be read and understood easily without the help of software, but it can look a lot better. SEAR reads setext documents and displays them beautifully using custom styles. SEAR also makes writing setext easy, providing a standard editor (that anyone familiar with TextEdit can use) and options to save and copy text (into setext, HTML, or rtf).
Download SEAR v1.2.1
What is setext?
Setext is a structured document format that was designed to be easily readable by both computers and humans. While many document formats use special data or tags to distinguish bold text or subtitles or the like, setext can be read without a special reader in plain text. For instance, to display a subtitle in HTML you must wrap it in tags like this: "<h1>This is a subtitle</h1>". Your web browser can distinguish the text from the tags and render it on screen, but reading it directly is difficult, especially when there are a lot of tags. Here is an example of some setext:
This is a subtitle ------------------ This is a paragraph that falls under the subtitle. This **text** is emphasized. This _text_ is underlined.
You can probably see that the setext is easy for you to read and you quickly identify what each special character means. Great! That is what it was designed for. Today, setext is often used for email and USENET. Even major web publications like TidBITS use setext.
Reading setext is simply better with SEAR
SEAR provides plenty of features for reading setext. First, it renders each document using web standard CSS style sheets. This not only makes the text much more attractive than plain text but also opens it up so that you can design your own styles. SEAR also lets you search any document, letting you find exactly what you were looking for. SEAR even provides a handy sidebar that lets you jump right to a specific subsection of the document.
Write setext, no experience necessary
The setext document format defines a good sized number of tags for formatting text, most of which make sense when reading. But do you really want to have to remember these tags when writing documents? Shouldn't it just be easier? It is with SEAR. SEAR provides a document window that works in much the same way as TextEdit. Simply type into the window and format using normal keyboard shortcuts or the handy toolbar buttons.
SEAR also lets you export to a number of formats. Obviously you want to be able to save it as setext, but it could be handy to also save it as a webpage (HTML) or in rich text format (rtf). But what if you don't want to save it, just copy and paste? SEAR can do that. Simply create your document, copy to the clipboard as setext (or HTML or rtf), and paste it into that email you are sending (or webpage or other document).
See it for yourself
SEAR is free to use as a reader, so go ahead and grab it. You'll never be bothered or nagged when using SEAR as a reader. To edit setext using SEAR, you'll need to purchase a registration code for only $5. That ensures the continued development of SEAR and helps pay for hosting costs (and gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling of support independent Mac software development). Here are some screenshots of SEAR in action.
