About the Author

Here's a little bit about me, Scott Huot, and the creation of the TextFixer website. This is a quick summary about how I started my career in software, published a book based on a website, and how Text Fixer was created.

How I Started my Web Publishing Career

I've been involved in the professional web publishing business since 2001. I worked for a large software company, Autodesk, for almost two decades before leaving to work on my own.

Great company to work for BTW - solid perks, good compensation, and awesome people. It was a fantastic working experience.

I started on a very small team in the company as a part-time, soon to be full-time, web publisher using HTML and JavaScript. CSS wasn't widely used at that time especially in a corporate environment. That would quickly change.

The web development of the day was all nested tables and very simple JavaScript - image rollovers and such. It was a very different era ☺

Author of a Book

During this time I, alongside a buddy of mine, ran a website called Not Proud which became a book published by Simon and Schuster. You might still be able to pick-up a copy of the book on Amazon if you're lucky.

My Time as a Web Publishing Manager

During my time at Autodesk, basic web technology quickly evolved as did I.

I became a manager for one of the company's web publishing departments. We specialized in very boutique type one-off projects that relied on pushing the technology as far as it would go at the time. We were in charge of the splashy online marketing mini-sites and related projects.

Alongside the glamor of figuring out challenging technical problems there also came a lot of very mundane tasks which is what lead to the creation of this site.

Online Publishing Problems I Experienced

When you get content to publish online, the text itself can come in a very wide variety of formats, most of which have to be changed in some way in order to enter them into the Content Management System we used for online publishing.

One of the most annoying ways to receive content was in a PDF. Marketing created these beautiful PDF case studies that would give to clients: a very effective selling tool but not so good to work with as a web publisher.

We would have to copy the paste that text out of the PDF into a text file. And then because the text was in these columns, we would have to remove all the line breaks and add a space at the end of the lines so that words didn't crash into each other.

This would take an hour out of my day every now and then until one day the monotony got to me and I wondered if I could make a simple tool to do this automatically and save me time.

So I created the Remove Line Breaks Tool and was saved from this manual drudgery for all eternity.

I thought other people in similar position might also benefit from this tool and thus Text FIxer was born. And I kept on adding simple free text tools until we get to the site as it is today.

More about Scott Huot

After a couple of decades experience in web development, I decided to create some online businesses which is how I currently pay the bills. I'm fully out of the corporate lifestyle and very rarely do any consulting. I'm very committed to being an independent entrepreneur. It's great!

I'm located up in Montreal and in my spare time I draw and buy too much stuff from Amazon. I have a pile of books in my office that I really should read, but it's so hard getting away from the computer. You know how it is.

I hope some of my efforts on this website have helped you.

Be good and have a great day.

- Scott