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A program, OrfText, was developed out of desperation in response to the absence of any way to display the sequences of genomes in such a way that helps a human make sense out of them. It is very easy to access and download sequences of specific genes, but there is no obvious way to download, say, an entire operon and make readily visible where one gene ends and the next begins. OrfText was designed to fit that need.
 

Typical screen of OrfText

The program facilitate navigating through the replicons of finished sequences and contigs of unfinished sequences. Clicking on the name of an open reading frame brings up another screen with information including the names of orthologs in other cyanobacteria.  One can block out segments of the sequence (or select an open reading frame as a block) and invert or translate it, then save it to a file. At present, OrfText runs only under DOS (within Windows), though there are plans to port it to the web. The program is freely downloaded by going to http://www.people.vcu.edu/~elhaij/software/orftext/