Quanta Plus

Quanta Plus bills itself as a Web development environment, saying its goal "is to be nothing less than the best possible tool for working with tagging and scripting languages." It goes a long way toward meeting that goal.

It eases HTML coding tasks with built-in tool bars for commonly used functions (bold, alignment, links and images). Many of the tags bring up dialog boxes that allow you to enter information for things like adding tables and images to HTML documents. But Quanta also has key capabilities that writers and editors need: spell check, handy text manipulation (capitalize, join lines and so on) and sophisticated search and replace that includes support for regular expressions.

Quanta is highly customizable, even offering the ability to design your own tool bars. There are three levels of what are called "user-definable actions": text actions, tag actions and script actions.

Text actions let you store commonly used text snippets -- "by Sharon Machlis" might be one for me.

Tag actions are what the name implies, allowing you to create a macro that includes opening and closing tags around highlighted text (or right next to each other if there's no highlighted text). It's easy to alter existing tags or create new ones and add them to tool bars.

Scripts are a little more complex. As far as I could see after checking the manual, there's no way to simply record keystrokes or built a nontext, nontag macro within Quanta. Instead, "script actions" run external code. This makes it fairly easy to write a Perl script and run it on your document without leaving Quanta, but not to, say, use the application's own search and replace to store commonly used search and replace tasks.