Many Mac users see megabytes of text flow across their screens every day.  There are documents created by co-workers, electronic mail, news items from information services, electronic bulletin board postings, and so on.  As the text pours past, most users want to capture parts of it for later reference or record-keeping.  Most Mac programs make it easy to copy text, but there is no good place to paste it, if it is to be found later.  It’s not good to create lots of little files of text, the scrapbook is bulky and impossible to search, and maintaining "log" files is a tedious process.  Another problem is that text created on other platforms often contains non-printing characters, linefeeds, hard carriage returns and other "junk" that make the text difficult to work with on the Mac.

Pearl helps by making it very easy to archive text (properly configured, Pearl can run, archive text and quit, with nothing more than a double-click), easy to clean up the format of the text, easy to browse archived text items and easy to search previously archived text items.