The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 8 out of 10]

• Developer: Amar Sagu / Product page
  
• Price: Freeware

Tofu is an interesting application -- it's basically a column-oriented text reader. Basically, Tofu will work with text (pasted, grabbed via a service, or in an opened file) and reformat it to display in multiple columns, all fully justified. This can make reading long, text-heavy documents much easier -- many websites (some would say including macosxhints!) display text on a few long lines, instead of multiple shorter lines in columns. Magazines and newspapers use shorter lines and columns because they're much easier for the reader to follow, especially in long, multi-page articles. Tofu provides a similar service for any text you care to feed it.

I use Tofu quite a bit when reading articles that are long on text and light on images (Tofu can display them, but since the layout gets modified, they may not make much sense where they show in the reformatted text). Just copy and paste a bunch of text into Tofu, and you're ready to go. The text flows into justified columns, fitting the window size you've chosen, and you're ready to read, scrolling left to right as you go.

Tofu includes a "live search" feature, too, so you can jump directly to any spot in the text just by typing a few characters that you'd like to search with. And if you use services-aware applications like Safari or OmniWeb, there's a service available (View in Columns) to make the process even quicker (though it opens the new window behind any existing Tofu windows, which might make you think it didn't work at first). You can set your preferred font, background color, and other options in Tofu's prefs, and there are a variety of keyboard and mouse-based scrolling shortcuts. If you find yourself with tired eyes after reading long articles on the web, give Tofu a try...