Macify was designed to help people who frequently move text from non-Macintosh computers to the Macintosh environment. I found this happening a lot during design work I was doing in 1986, so I finally got aggravated enough to write this small utility. The frustration arises out of the limitations of the non-Mac computers. Most other computers do not have access to all the wonderful characters we have come to take for granted on the Macintosh. On the Mac there are curly quote marks, proper long dashes (em-dashes), and many special ligatures and characters. This is not true on other computers. So every time I transferred a text file from one of those computers to the Macintosh I would have to spend tedious minutes searching for a long list of offensive characters and replacing them with their proper Mac equivalents. I thought “Argh! The Computer Should Do This For Me!” And now Macify does do this for me.
In addition to this is the fact that most other computers tend to use mono-spaced fonts. This is the kind of font where every character is the same width. Mono-spaced fonts are much like what you will find on any typewriter. Since most of us in this generation have learned to type with typewriters or computers using mono-spaced fonts, we do not realize that the high quality output of the PostScript laser printers actually obliges us to use a different set of typing conventions. For instance: when typing with a typewriter, two spaces follow a period; but when typing in a proportionally-spaced Macintosh font, only one space follows a period. These new rules are based on the rules of typography rather than typing, and since the Mac’s output is so close to typographical quality it really makes more sense to follow these rules. Macify does its best to find these subtle mistakes and rectify them.
Macify can also do other standard chores of cleaning a text file from a non-Macintosh computer. It can get rid of “gremlin” characters, those pesky devils that turn into empty square boxes in most Macintosh fonts. It can fix the line breaks which often occur much too frequently in file from foreign computers. It can do its best to replace spaces with tabs (or any other character) in an effort to keep columnar tables in columns. And it can do some very unsophisticated upper/lower case conversion especially for use on files that come to the Macintosh in all upper case.
Since for different tasks you may decide to use different sets of Macify’s features, the program is set up in such a way that you can specify exactly which features you want activated for any particular translation. To make it easier to remember and retrieve your most common sets of features, Macify provides you with the option to save a particular set of options into a Macify document. This document will have an icon similar to Macify itself, and you can double click on this document from the finder to start up Macify with your specialized set of features.
For instance, say that one task of yours requires that “fi” and “fl” not be turned into ligatures as Macify would normally do. Open Macify up and choose Conversion Options from the Options menu. Click in the Change “fi” and “fl” to Proper Ligatures check box to make the check go away. Click OK. Then use the Save Options choice in the File menu to save the current options with the name “No Ligatures”. You can now quit Macify and move the “No Ligatures” file to any folder that you wish. From now on, whenever you wish to start up Macify with the ligatures option turned off, just double click on the file “No Ligatures” instead of the Macify application.
Macify has been designed as a tool to save time. It will not solve all of your problems or design your desktop publishing art. It will not even read files saved as anything other than “text only”. But I do hope that it will help your documents look just a touch more professional and save you at least a little bit of frustration.
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