More ways to convert rich text to plain text on the clipboard If your OS X app doesn't have a paste without formatting option, readers came up with a number of suggestions.
- Rich Text Format Yahoo
- Apps For Format Rich Text Newsletters For Mac Mail
- Rich Text Vs Plain Text
- Rich Text Format
- New Rich Text Document
There’s an item that’s been near the top of my iOS wish list almost since the iPhone was released: RTF (rich text format) support. Before you start shouting that iOS already has such support, allow me to rewind to the beginning of the story.
Rich Notes is a nuts-and-bolts text editor with formatting, and it does that job pretty well. Formatting While the app is free, you’ll have to pay to get all the fonts and formats using the in. You can also write or respond to emails with rich text formatting. So, if you want to change the font, add bold lettering, bullet point a section, or just slap an emoji in there, it's all available right from the toolbar at the top of your new email.
If all one means by RTF support is the ability to create bold, italicized, and underlined text, then yes, this feature has been available from an assortment of iOS apps for quite some time. For example, you’ll find it in “Office” apps such as QuickOffice and Office² HD. These apps go beyond the just-mentioned trio of font styling options, allowing for a variety of fonts, font sizes, and colors. With Office² HD, you can even insert graphics into a document. Apple’s iWork for iOS apps provide similar formatting support.
So what’s the problem? For one thing, until iOS 5, Apple did not include any system frameworks for RTF formatting. As a result, each app had to invent its own method for offering these options. This limited the number of apps that would or could provide RTF support.
With iOS 5, Apple did add a limited rich text formatting capability. You can see it in action in the Mail app, where you can select among bold, italics, and underlined text when composing a message. However, even here, there are several significant caveats.
First, accessing these style changes requires going through a cumbersome series of steps that most people will never bother to use, even if they manage to figure it out (see Macworld’s review of iOS 5 for all the gory details). Having a Bluetooth keyboard is of no help; Command-key shortcuts for these options don’t work.
Second, the RTF options remain a private framework for now. This means that third-party apps can’t access it. As far as I can tell, even Apple is restricting use of the framework to just the Mail app for now.
A third problem is that RTF changes in Mail do not survive a copy-paste. This means, for example, if you copy italicized text and paste it, the pasted text will lose its italics. This is true even if you paste within the same document from which you originally copied the formatted text. This problem extends, to a lesser extent, to all apps that offer RTF formatting. For example, if you copy italicized text from one app and paste it into a document from another app, the italics will be lost even if the receiving app has RTF support.
Even if Apple overcomes all of these iOS limitations, there remains one overriding omission. As far as I know, you cannot edit .rtf documents in any iOS app. This is problematic for me because, on my Mac, I do almost all my article writing in TextEdit. As such, I save documents in TextEdit’s default .rtf file format. I prefer this because RTF files are widely supported and can be opened by almost any application. Further, as all of my article writing is for online posting, I don’t need the fancier features of other word-processing programs. All I really need are basic font formatting options plus embedded URLs.
Rich Text Format Yahoo
For those times when I might like to work on my iPad, rather than my Mac, it would be great if I could transfer a .rtf file from my Mac to my iPad and continue to edit it there. Alas, this is not possible. I can view .rtf documents on my iPad, but not edit them. A partial workaround would be to save my TextEdit documents in a Word format and open them in an iPad app such as QuickOffice. While this largely works (except that embedded links do not transfer), I would prefer a more direct solution.
At last, I return to my assertion at the top of this column. I would like to see adequate RTF support in iOS. Specifically, I would like iOS to provide frameworks, accessible by third-party apps, that provide the basic font formatting options available in applications such as QuickOffice—with the addition of support for embedded URLs. I would like these formatting options to be easy to implement and to survive a copy and paste operation. And I would like iOS apps that can edit .rtf files created in TextEdit. I don’t expect to see all of this happen any time soon. But, if Apple intends to push the iPad as a productivity machine, I expect such changes will arrive eventually.
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Mac users have been able to create and use text clippings since the last century and Mac OS 9, but the feature remains relatively underexploited — despite being such a great way to boost productivity.
What are text clippings?
Text clippings are small chunks of text on your Mac. Easy to create, they are also easy to use: To add the text to anything you write in any application, you just need to drag & drop the clipping to the document and the words in the clipping will be added to that document. The text can be long, short, or medium, and it can contain HTML links.
How do you create a text clipping?
Creating a text clipping is very easy. If you ever select text to copy & paste it, then you’re almost there. Here’s the fastest way to make a text clipping:
- Select some text
- With the text selected, drag & drop the text to your Mac Desktop or Finder window.
- “Boom” -- You’ll see a little text clipping appear.
- By default the clip will name itself using the first few words of the text, but you can change this.
Tip: If you are going to create multiple clippings to help you automate various tasks, you may want to create a new Folder called Clippings on your Mac. Pop them all in there.
Text clippings retain the rich text formatting of the original text – bold, underlines, italics, even web links are respected.
How to use a text clipping
You can create text clippings from almost any app that contains text just by dragging & dropping selected text to the Desktop or a Finder window.
Once created, you can use that clipping to automatically place text in almost any kind of document. They work with Pages, Mail, Word, and more. You can even drop the clipping into a search engine so long as you have that service open in your browser (you can’t drop them into the Safari search bar).
You don’t need to open the clipping, select and copy and paste anything; just drag the clipping, and drop it into the appropriate place in your document.
Why is using text clippings a good thing?
If you regularly write similar text as part of your job, you’ll want to use text clippings to automate that drudgery.
You may want to create text clippings for standard opening paragraphs for job applications or business-related letters or emails. You might want to create signatures. You may need to regularly place specific paragraphs in your work. You may even just want to create a social media pester message like the one I place at the end of my stories (which I use text clippings for).
Mac users often use clippings for:
Apps For Format Rich Text Newsletters For Mac Mail
- Name and address
- Multiple signatures (e.g., business and personal)
- Letter templates
- Email templates
- Regularly used code snippets
- Anything else they find they must write in the same way every day
This handy little feature can save you from the burden of repeated tasks, enabling you to focus on the more interesting elements of what you do.
Think about it: The few minutes you squander on such repeated tasks quickly becomes a big chunk of time. If you spend five minutes every day writing the same text, that’s 25 minutes a week, almost two hours each month and just short of one full 24-hour day wasted each year.
I am certain you’d be better off doing something else.
Rich Text Vs Plain Text
Insert text clipping below:
Rich Text Format
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New Rich Text Document
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