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From: flowers@lanai.cs.ucla.edu (Margot Flowers)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Text editing on Macs
Message-ID: <28676@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 31 Oct 89 14:47:27 GMT
References: <88714@pyramid.pyramid.com> <1630@cbnewsj.ATT.COM> <1533@esquire.UUCP>
Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: flowers@lanai.UUCP (Margot Flowers)
Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department
Lines: 15

In article <1533@esquire.UUCP> yost@esquire.UUCP (David A. Yost) writes:
>Is there a plain text editor for the mac that can manipulate
>rectangular areas of text?  I'd love to be able to hold down
>option or cmd or something while dragging the cursor and have
>it select a rectangular area instead of a stream of text. ...
>Of course, this is only useful when the font is constant-width.

While not a "plain text editor", Microsoft Word will do this, both
versions 3 and 4.  Hold down the option key while selecting.  It will
work with any kind of font, not just fixed width (though of course the
meaningfulness of your selection will vary depending on the layout of
your document).  One handy usage of column selection is to add up a
column of figures -- select a column and then give the calculate
command (document menu).  This was documented with version 3, don't
know about 4.