PebbleWrap is a Web application that wraps plain-text paragraphs and lists to a specified maximum line length, replacing tabs with four spaces each, inserting line breaks as appropriate, removing spaces immediately before and after the new line breaks, and then adding indentation as appropriate to match the first line. PebbleWrap can also unwrap text, make two columns from single-column text, and make attractive plain-text tables from delimited text.
Wrapping Paragraphs and Lists
Unwrapping Paragraphs and Lists
Making Tables
Making Columns
See Also
PlainTextFormatting.txt (Contains general guidelines for formatting plain text.)
A paragraph ends wherever there are one or more blank lines (or at the end of the supplied text).
A list item starts with one of the following sequences of characters (after PebbleWrap replaces any tabs):
Zero or more spaces, an asterisk or a hyphen, and then one or more spaces
Zero or more spaces, one or two digits, a period or a right parenthesis, and then one or more spaces
Zero or more spaces, a lowercase letter, a period or a right parenthesis, and then one or more spaces
Click the Wrap button to wrap the contents of the text area to the specified maximum line length.
To change the maximum line length, replace the current number with a different positive integer (for example: 70).
NOTE: Line length includes any indentation at the beginning of the line but does not include line-break characters or any spaces at the end of a line.
Click the Unwrap button to unwrap the contents of the text area.
NOTE: When unwrapping a paragraph, PebbleWrap compresses whitespace; then, once the paragraph is unwrapped, the program adds an extra space between sentences (so that there are a total of two spaces between sentences). If you have abbreviations that end with periods (as in "Dr. Smith" or "Capt. Crunch"), PebbleWrap may interpret the periods as sentence-ending punctuation marks. In those case, you'll have to manually remove the extra space.
PebbleWrap can create a highly readable and attractive two‑column or three‑column table as long as the first row comprises column headings and no cell in the table spans more than one column or row.
To prepare text for conversion into a table, use one non-blank line per table row, where the first row comprises column headings. (NOTE: When making a table, PebbleWrap ignores blank lines in the input, but always places a line break at the beginning and at the end of the output.) Delimit adjacent cells within a row by entering a vertical bar (|). Specify a manual line break within a cell by entering a backslash (\). To specify a literal vertical bar or backslash, enter two in a row (|| or \\). To specify an empty cell, use a space for the cell contents (to avoid doubled vertical bars). To specify a blank line within a cell, use a space for the contents of that line (to avoid doubled backslashes).
To turn the delimited text in the text area into a table, click the Tabulate button. PebbleWrap will observe the specified table indent (which must be a non-negative integer not greater than 36) and maximum line length, wrap all the table's individual cells, and align the cells in columns with four spaces of padding between them.
Here's a "before and after" example with a maximum line length of 70 and a table indent of 4:
Animal|Description Rabbit|Usually a furry mammal with a cotton tail; however a rabbit may sometimes be made of chocolate. Caterpillar|Furry insect characterized by the following:\ \ * Crawls at the moment.\ \ * Will fly someday.
Animal Description
------ -----------
Rabbit Usually a furry mammal with a cotton tail; however
a rabbit may sometimes be made of chocolate.
Caterpillar Furry insect characterized by the following:
* Crawls at the moment.
* Will fly someday.
To format text as two balanced columns in which the text flows from the first into the second, paste or type your unwrapped text into the text area (or paste wrapped text and then unwrap it), and then click the Columnize button.
Before making the columns, PebbleWrap wraps the text to the appropriate column width after removing any line breaks from the beginning and end of the text input. When making the columns, PebbleWrap does not include any blank lines at the end of the first column or at the beginning of the second column. PebbleWrap adds a single line break to the beginning and end of the returned result.
You can change the maximum line length, which is the number of characters (including spaces) spanning across both columns and the space between them. You can also select or clear the check box that allows a paragraph to be split across the two columns.