Introduction

Do something once, it’s creative. Do something twice, it’s repetitive. Do something three times, and you can probably automate it.

Adrian Woods, Technical Art Lead, Microsoft

Many years ago I produced a monthly shipping schedule for a worldwide shipping company. It was a freelance job that I worked on at night in the dim corner of our basement apartment bedroom. I received messy text files on 5 1/2-inch PC floppy disks. Out of self-defense I taught myself how to automate text cleanup in a DOS text editing program (which was all I had at the time). And when finished, I transferred the file to a Mac, where I did the layout in PageMaker. From there, I learned that I could add style tags to the text as part of the automated cleanup ...

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