TextEdit (in OPENSTEP/Rhapsody/Mac OS X)

RacerX

RacerX

Old Rhapsody User
As some people may already know, I happen to think TextEdit is a great application and I've posted pages on my sites (Mac OS X version and Rhapsody version) discussing it's usage and features.

I had noticed the other day that someone who had linked to the Mac OS X version page had pointed out that it was dated (that page covers the 10.2 version). Plus Apple has added a bunch of new features in the 10.3 and 10.4 versions, so I decided to put up yet another TextEdit page (here).

So, what is different about this page from my previous pages?

I decided that TextEdit deserved a complete review of all it's versions... starting by looking at Edit in NEXTSTEP 3.3 and the first version of TextEdit in OPENSTEP (it is a demo app in the NextDeveloper directory). I then look at the Rhapsody version, followed by the Mac OS X Developer Preview (4) version, and then the 10.0/10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4 versions.

I finished the page off by putting a ton of links to different resources I have found valuable in using TextEdit in all it's incarnations. These are at the bottom of the page.

It always seems like people dismiss TextEdit because it looks too basic and simple. Hopefully this page can provide a more complete reference on things that can be done with TextEdit and show what the app really has the ability to do.
 
Interesting. I have to admit, I never knew TextEdit was so powerful. So many of its features are buried a little, and I guess I never really looked at it with each new version of OS X. I never knew you could make tables. Heck, it took me a while to figure out how even after reading your page!

Maybe Apple really doesn't desperately need to update AppleWorks. No, we still need drawing, painting and spreadsheet.

Now if only I could figure out how to get a font menu! I've hated the font panel since I first used it. It just seems so backwards to me. All I want is a font menu and a size menu. Am I missing something? I hope so.
 
Mikuro said:
Now if only I could figure out how to get a font menu! I've hated the font panel since I first used it. It just seems so backwards to me. All I want is a font menu and a size menu. Am I missing something? I hope so.
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There is a keyboard command for increasing and decreasing the font sizes.

As for a font menu, I use FontSight.
 

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Cat said:
Now if it only had support for footnotes, I could actually use it ...
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Yeah, then it could become be a fully bloated word processor and they'd have to come up with a new, quick, general purpose text editor.

Same old, same old.

The new features in the 10.4 version are nice and useful but there comes a point where it's time to stop the bloat.
 
Let me tell you a funny story about footnotes. Recently I had to convert a LaTeX document into something readable by MS Word. Now there are several ways to do that, depending on your necessities. The problematic point are footnotes. If you convert LaTeX to XHTML, all footnotes will become pseudo-endnote anchors and links, but there is a mystic way for the acolytes to convert it through OpenOffice. First you convert LaTeX to XML suitable for OO and then you can try to export it from OO to something Word likes. Smaller matters of formatting aside, footnotes tend not to get through, because they become (weirdly formatted) pseudo-footnotes with internal anchors, which are very unwieldy and lead to a host of problems and unintended consequences. For the absolute die-hard, you could also *gasp* export your OO document to Word 2003 XML, _which Word 2004 for the Mac does not support_ (!). Now the funny story is, and here we get back to the main topic, TextEdit _does_ support Word 2003 XML pretty well *except* for the frigging footnotes.

Morale: Word 2003 XML functionality is not supported by microsoft on the Mac, but is provided by OpenOffice. TextEdit can open any Word document I have throuwn at it, even when encoded in Word 2003 XML, except for footnotes. Crazy world isn't it? If TextEdit would support footnotes in all their bloaty glory, I could probably erase both OpenOffice and MS Office from my system, saving ~1GB of bloat. All I need is LaTeX to RTF with reliable footnote support. The LaTeX2RTF utility, while generating footnotes just fine, screws up almost all other aspects of conversion, such as bibliographic data and unicode. Sorry for the rant.

Praise to TextEdit for supporting Word 2003 XML, shame for still not doing footnotes.
 
I'd put the shame on _anything_ but TextEdit here, though, Cat. ;) ... While I'd basically expect OOo, MS Office and LaTeX to find away of doing this, I'm perfectly un-surprised that TextEdit still doesn't handle footnotes.
 
I'm disappointed because TextEdit seems capable of doing so much (bloated) stuff, except the one dealbreaking thing that I need. It claims:

You can open and edit existing documents, even if they were originally created by a different application, such as Microsoft Word.
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Except that it doesn't support all features of the format. It doesn't even try to generate some pseudo-footnotes, they simply *poof* disappear.

So, while it appears perfectly able to do almost anything that Pages can do with respect to embedding images and using fancy fonts, for me it is well nigh useless, as it doesn't support a very simple and basic feature like footnotes. I'm honestly impressed what it can do, for an app that you get free with the OS. I just wanted to point out something that might seem a minor flaw to others but is a major problem for me. The longer rant was just to illustrate the point.

Of course the latex conversion problem itself is not TextEdit's fault! But if it did support footnotes, I would have an easier time getting the job done. And seeing how it claims to support doc and rtf I was kinda hoping that it would indeed do that ...

Is footnotes _really_ such an advanced function? I don't think so ... especially when you're trying to be so active in the academic/education market it is quite essential.

Sorry for the long post. I'm just frustrated and disappointed.
 
You ask the question...
Is footnotes _really_ such an advanced function?​
And the answer is yes.

Specially, as you noted, no one seems to have a standardized way of handling footnotes.

I'm sorry, which way would you have Apple apply footnotes to TextEdit? And who would start screaming because they did it your way rather than the way they wanted?

Complete and total lack of standards in implementing footnotes is the best reason to not even attempt to add them to TextEdit.

You complained about TextEdit's ability to read Word documents... Microsoft uses a binary document format which has to be reverse engineered for non-Microsoft apps to read and display Word documents. Is it Apple's fault? No. They did the best they could given what TextEdit could support and what they could reverse engineer (I believe the conversion is based on the Word 97 format as that is widely documented).

So, when will TextEdit get footnotes... I don't know. Maybe after the Open Document Format has been adopted by enough people. Apple might consider moving from RTF (which is not the same as Microsoft's RTF by the way) to ODF in TextEdit.

But your rant shines a bright light on the problem though you seem to refuse to see it... footnotes are not the problem of TextEdit (it avoids the problem altogether) it is the problem of all the other apps that attempt to implement them in different and incompatible ways.

And, I would point out, the reason for those implementations is application lock in. At least LaTeX is a pretty open standard... but Office is proprietary, OpenOffice is based on StarOffice and is still pretty proprietary, AppleWorks (which supports footnotes) also uses a proprietary format.

I suggest you read up on the move to non-proprietary formats by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (which is also being address by the State of Minnesota soon). The best coverage this is over at Groklaw.

If you are going to spend so much energy ranting, aim it at the true problems and not an innocent bystander like TextEdit. ;)
 
Lt Major Burns said:
does it include a word count? that was the one feature that stopped me using text edit full time.
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You can add it via services using Devon Technologies WordService (it is at the bottom of the page).

You select a section or the whole document, then go to Services to Statistics and up pops a dialog with a count of characters, spaces, words and lines.

And because it is a service, it is there for all Cocoa apps. I use it just as much in OmniWeb as I do in TextEdit.
 
RacerX said:
I'm sorry, which way would you have Apple apply footnotes to TextEdit? And who would start screaming because they did it your way rather than the way they wanted?
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As Apple _claims_ to support MS Word .doc format and RTF format I would like them to indeed support them either way.

You complained about TextEdit's ability to read Word documents...
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No, I *praised* TextEdit's support for Word format, incuding its ability to read Word 2003 XML, while Word 2004 for Mac cannot.

So, when will TextEdit get footnotes... I don't know. Maybe after the Open Document Format has been adopted by enough people. Apple might consider moving from RTF (which is not the same as Microsoft's RTF by the way) to ODF in TextEdit.
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That would be great. But ODF isn't completely viable yet, we're getting there, even up to and including bibliographic data support. However, I have to deal with these problems here and now, so I'm stuck with what is supported and available.

But your rant shines a bright light on the problem though you seem to refuse to see it... footnotes are not the problem of TextEdit (it avoids the problem altogether) it is the problem of all the other apps that attempt to implement them in different and incompatible ways.
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I deplore the lack of standards and the poor support for the few standards that we have. Nevertheless, again, I have to deal with the messy problems that I find here and now, that's life. I work with multiple text formats and encodings all day and I need to convert between them. If TextEdit would support footnotes, some of my problems would vanish here and now.

I suggest you read up on the move to non-proprietary formats by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (which is also being address by the State of Minnesota soon). The best coverage this is over at Groklaw.
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Please don't try to lecture me on things I already know. I cannot influence the data formats that are given to me nor can I influence the requirements of where I have to send my texts. I lament the absence of a feature form a product whose claims entail that it should support it.

If you are going to spend so much energy ranting, aim it at the true problems and not an innocent bystander like TextEdit. ;)
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:rolleyes: I reacted to the statement that footnotes are considered bloat. Clearly we have different requirements. You like TexEdit, fine. For me it is useless and I just tried to explain why.
 
Cat said:
As Apple _claims_ to support MS Word .doc format and RTF format I would like them to indeed support them either way.

and​

I lament the absence of a feature form a product whose claims entail that it should support it.
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Apple/NeXT's RTF/RTFD format never, ever, supported footnotes. And they were never passed off as being the same format as, say, Microsoft's RTF which might. In the 18 years the format has been in use on the platform, no claim of footnote support ever existed.

And for support for other formats, they are limited by what TextEdit natively supports... for example, add an image to a text document and try to save as a Word doc. You can't because TextEdit doesn't embed images... it places them in a package (RTFD).


:rolleyes: I reacted to the statement that footnotes are considered bloat. Clearly we have different requirements. You like TexEdit, fine. For me it is useless and I just tried to explain why.
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We all got your explanation in your first post in this thread... all subsequent posts were not needed and added nothing to the topic.

If you want to rant about footnotes... start your own thread on the subject. But as far as I can see, your posts (after the first) have as much place in this threat on TextEdit as they would on a thread about Mail.

This thread is here to help people for whom TextEdit could be a viable alternative... that is not you, so please move on.

Thank You.
 
:) Ah. I *knew* the day would come when you would have to defend this thread against "intruders". ;) ... But don't go into a flamewar, please. Even for those for whom "TextEdit could be a viable alternative", the lack of footnotes could be a deal-breaker, so this information certainly has its place in the thread. The details (whose fault is it, really...) don't really belong here, but hey: We've certainly have had threads that went faaaaaaaaar more off-topic, haven't we.

So let's just sum it up this way: TextEdit can do _many_ things, but not footnotes so far - and there's no _obvious_ choice on how to handle footnotes in a first iteration. And since TextEdit is not basically _required_ to handle them (it's the basic built-in text editor after all, not some highend software you paid for), I guess Apple will try and tackle such problems with Pages _first_.

About Apple's RTF/RTFD and MS' RTF: I've found RTF (not the 'D version) to be a very good base-format to work with different platforms. Of course this has to do with my way of working with text. Formatting (and footnotes etc.) for me is part of the _layout_ process, which starts later. In InDesign. The only things I *allow* for my process are bold and italics. And I tend to work with "justified" paragraphs, although I could care less if that latter information is lost on the way between platforms. (It's easy to select all and choose "justify".) In that process, I haven't found any real showstoppers between different RTF-specifications. (Excluding RTFD again. Pictures have their place in the layout-process, not in writing, for me.)
 
fryke said:
:) Ah. I *knew* the day would come when you would have to defend this thread against "intruders". ;) ... But don't go into a flamewar, please.
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I didn't respond to simbalala's post for the very reason that I didn't want to pull this off topic (though I had a post composed... you should have seen it, it was really long and everything :D ), even though I hardly think what Apple has added so far constitutes bloat.

The thing about the RTFD format (or package) is that TextEdit just drops whatever you put into it into the package document. So old NeXT RTFD document are actually hard to read in Mac OS X because EPS and PS were native image formats for NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and aren't for Mac OS X.

For the most part, I've considered the RTFD format to be more for layout... either in the creation of PDF documents or printing to paper, but not as a cross platform document format. In fact I make note of the fact on both my NeXTanswers page and RhapsodyAnswers page that the format is mainly for those platforms rather than others (like Windows... or even Mac OS X).
 
I think RTFD is great for creating simple manuals for co-workers. Grab screenshots, paste them into your little manual. You can simply make PDFs at the end for sending them around and keep the RTFD for later changes. Very simple - much less hassle than doing the same in Word or InDesign.

About EPS/PS files in RTFD: At least in Mac OS X (Client 10.0 onward), RTFD has stayed compatible AFAIK, and I expect it to be compatible in the future. Shouldn't OS X still open NeXT-RTFDs fine - but not vice versa? (Lack of PDF support in earlier versions rather than the other way 'round? Mac OS X usually opens EPS-files fine, although it takes a while to conver it to PDF...)
 
fryke said:
About EPS/PS files in RTFD: At least in Mac OS X (Client 10.0 onward), RTFD has stayed compatible AFAIK, and I expect it to be compatible in the future. Shouldn't OS X still open NeXT-RTFDs fine - but not vice versa? (Lack of PDF support in earlier versions rather than the other way 'round? Mac OS X usually opens EPS-files fine, although it takes a while to conver it to PDF...)
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Well, Mac OS X didn't support EPS/PS images in Preview or TextEdit until 10.3.x. Before that you would have needed a third party app to help with those types of images (I use PStill which you can set up as a service on older versions of Mac OS X to convert EPS/PS graphics when an app attempts to read them... which is cool, except that it also did it with the Finder when using the preview).

I move RTF/RTFD files back and forth between Mac OS X and Rhapsody all the time... but on both systems I tend to mainly use TIFF as my default image format. I also tend to use fonts I know are common to both systems. Any formating that is used in a Mac OS X RTF/RTFD document is discarded when read in Rhapsody (which includes unsupported tab stops).

PDF graphics would appear as a file in the document in Rhapsody/OPENSTEP as I recall, double clicking on the file icon would open the file in the default PDF application (on my systems that would be PDFView), assuming that the format is readable (graphics aren't as much of an issue in PDF formating as layouts are).
 

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