20 Year Anniversary Update of TextSpec
As some of you might have already noticed, I’m working hard to (re-)publish lots of projects from the previous platforms (which where mostly closed communities) onto this new public community. During all the adapting (to be publicly suitable/usable) of the projects, I also found some quite old (and I mean REALLY old) projects of mine. Some even dating back over 20 years ago.
TextSpec 2.0B (about 20 years old now as of 2024)
One of those projects is TextSpec 2.0B which was designed for one simple task: Count the words, characters and lines in a (pasted) piece of plain text. TextSpec was in those days a tool used by many people close to me and later even by lots of students at the schools I went to. Simply because many didn’t had Microsoft Word on their home computer and used WordPad instead (which in 2024 still can’t give you the information TextSpec could). While others just wanted a simple small piece of software with a fast startup time to get the information they needed (character or word count).
I recently decided to also release some of those very old projects (of my early development days) in their own category called the “XNL Future Technologies Time Capsule“. For this I also wrote a dedicated page which explains a bit more about this Time Capsule Project and it might also answer some questions you might have about these projects.
XNL TextSpec 3.0
I however decided to not just (finally) release these older projects, I also decided to completely rewrite a couple of them. And one of those completely rewritten and enhanced programs/projects from back in the day is XNL TextSpec 3.0. It has basically been fully rewritten (from scratch) in .NET Framework and does the same (and much more) as TextSpec 2.0B.
TextSpec 3.0 can count words, sentences (new in 3.0), characters, lines (enters), estimate file size (and unit convert to KB, MB etc), supports rich-text (new in 3.0) and much more.
I would highly recommend checking out the page of XNL TextSpec 3.0 to see all the features it has to offer, because if you need a simple tool just to get the specifications of your (pasted) text/document, then XNL TextSpec 3.0 might be just what you need 🙂
Open-Source (Visual Basic .NET)
Just like the old TextSpec 2.0B has been published with its original source code (written in Visual Basic 6) now, I decided to also publish XNL TextSpec 3.0 as open-source. XNL TextSpec 3.0 has been written in Visual Basic .NET which you can even download for free these days. More on why I use(d) Visual Basic for the new version can be read on the project/product page of XNL TextSpec 3.0 as well as where you can download your own copy of the (free) Visual Studio Community Edition (which also includes Visual Basic).
Note: The Source of XNL TextSpec 3.0 has not been released to be an ‘open-source community project‘, it has been released to give you the ability to ‘look under the hood’ so to speak. The license on the page of XNL TextSpec explains how you can (or can’t) use the source-code 🙂