TextMangler will display the result of 'mangling' a file or calculating a character frequency table. It does not display the original text. When you save the TextMangler output, the resulting text file (with a 'spilled ink' icon) can be opened in any word processor. Double-clicking on a saved file will open TextMangler, but not the file itself.
How it works: TextMangler calculates a Markov table from a text file, and then builds a Markov chain from that table. (See 'The Algorithms' for more information about the Markov table and chain.) If the text contains pairs of words that appear more than once, the result of building a Markov chain is a 'mangled' text. Much of the mangled text is readable and makes sense, but some sentences are scrambled together, often with hilarious results.
The mangled file is built using random numbers to generate the chain, so you can get different results every time you click on the 'Do It' button. Try mangling the same file several times and save the best ones.
TextMangler can also calculate a character frequency table for a data file. This will tell you how many of each letter of the alphabet is contained in the file. The information can be useful if you want to solve a simple substitution cipher, but otherwise it is just for fun. The table is formatted with spaces, not tabs; for a better-looking table, use a word processor to 'even up' the columns with tabs.
The size of the largest file you can mangle depends on how much RAM you have. However, calculating the character frequency table uses very little RAM, regardless of the size of the file.
