Finder text clippings

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1

Working with the DTPro 2 beta, I have come up against something I can’t figure out - but I suspect this question applies also to v.1.x and I simply didn’t notice before.

I have a number of older text clippings - bits of info that I believe I collected over the past few years by selecting chunks of text in various kinds of docs, and dragging them out to the Desktop.

I’ve noticed that if I do something similar now (in Leopard), I’ll get a variety of different formats - rtf clippings, picture clippings, real text files, etc -depending on the app I’m dragging from, so I really don’t remember how I generated these older ones

When opened in the Finder, the contents are displayed and can be copied (and pasted elsewhere), but cannot be directly edited.

These clippings show up in DT as .txt docs, but always zero bytes in size, AND no preview/view is possible within DT. Converting them to rich or plain text within DT does not change anything.

Fortunately, by dragging them back out to the desktop, I can again see the content by ‘opening’ them in the Finder.

So I can always manually convert these bits to real text files by opening them in the Finder, copying the ‘content’ (if that’s what we call it) and pasting it into a new text file, and reimporting that into DT…but there are a lot of them so I’d rather avoid that if possible.

Can anyone suggest how to view and use these kinds of documents directly within DT?

(I’m guessing these clippings are from an earlier implementation of the way I drag things out of docs in Leopard now, and that I won’t run into this again with current work - but it would also be great if someone could confirm that for me! :wink:

Thanks in advance

Steven

2

Just to add a couple of additional bits:

  1. After scanning a number of the problematic clippings, I believe that most of them were made by dragging content from emails in Eudora, 2003-5 (under whatever OS version I would have used then). I’m still fairly sure I made them by dragging selected text to the Finder.

All the problematic files/clips seem to have the suffix .txt (but not all .txt files are problematic)

  1. Dragging from some apps (e.g. Mail) to the Finder now appears to produce a similar file (a window with the copied text in it, but not directly editable) BUT these have the suffix .textClipping, AND when dragged into DT, it sees them as RTF files and displays them just fine.

Not sure if this clarifies or obfuscates… but at least I can see that the problem is clearly limited to a specific subset of older files.

Steven