I am importing. Mainly Excel and PowerPoint/Keynote files.
Your DTP file is a package. That is a special type of folder. Inside this folder you have subfolders for backups and files as well as the database itself, a settings file and a lock file. In the Files subfolder all the imported files of unknown file type are stored, which are the ones DTP cannot display itself.
[size=75]BTW, I hope DTP V2 will use Leopards Quickview.[/size]
When you double-click such a file in DTP, the associated application is started working and saving using that file in the Files subfolder. No problem here.
[size=75]@Bill: correct me when I am wrong or if there is danger (on the other hand, I use this for months now without any trouble).[/size]
I see. This is the root problem. You are talking about RTF files, which can be displayed and edited inside DTP and are not stored in the Files subfolder. They are instead stored in the binary database file.
[size=75]BTW, I read in this forum before that V2 will change that and then the workflow as described above should be also possible with RTF files.
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workaround
Anyhow. I suggest as long as we use V1.x and you want to import rather than index - a choice I understand fully as I never ever even touched the Index feature for a multitude of reasons - you should use the clipboard. Something like this:
1 - select the RTF in DTP
2 - hit Cmd+A (“select all”) and Cmd+C (“copy”)
3 - open NeoOffice or whatever RTF editor you prefer
4 - open a new document
5 - hit Cmd+V (“paste”)
6 - do your editing
7 - hit Cmd+A (“select all”) and Cmd+C (“copy”)
8 - go back to the original RTF in DTP
9 - hit Cmd+A (“select all”) and Cmd+V (“paste”)
I have zero background in Apple Script, but it is easy to imagine that you could write a simple script that does 1-5 and another script that does 7-9 automatically, removing the pain of manual steps.
alternative approach
The thing I would do is to edit such documents in a non-RTF format like Pages, Scrivener package, Microsoft Word … and then “print” into a PDF file. Import the resulting PDF file and whenever there are changes replace it with the current version. The original file would of course also live in DTP as unknown file type.
This approach however gets ugly when you want to have replicas of the document in the database and it completely removes the ability to do minor changes directly in DTP.
/Sven