HOME
TOPICS
ABOUT ME
MAIL
|
| technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T h e R o a d L e s s T r a v e l e d
Use text clippings to keep track of electronic documentation
Feb. 25, 2004
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard
Apple's never been known for exhaustive user manuals. In fact, the philosophy of the original Macintosh discouraged printed manuals. If the computer was so hard to use that you needed to look for help in a book, Apple figured it wasn't doing its job.
And so the practice continues today. Your new Mac actually did come with a manual, but you probably never looked at it. My wife, Nancy, hooked up her new iMac on Christmas Day without consulting either me or the iMac manual and has been using it daily ever since. She still hasn't looked in the book and has asked me only a few questions in the intervening time.
(Her most recent question concerned which keys to press to scroll quickly to the top or bottom of a message in Apple's Mail program. I told her to use Cmd-Up Arrow and Cmd-Down Arrow, and she discovered that Ctrl-Up Arrow and Ctrl-Down Arrow did almost the same thing. The difference? With Cmd, the cursor moves also; with Ctrl, the cursor stays where it is.)
Some programs are still packaged the old-fashioned way, of course. When you buy Photoshop Elements 2.0, my favorite image editor, you get a paperback manual, and I have a dozen other programs that came the same way. But a quick count shows that most of the software I've acquired since switching from Windows to Mac OS X, whether from Apple itself or from independent manufacturers, arrived without a printed manual.
For a while, I coped with this new reality by printing the documentation I got with the software. But I've stopped trying to turn back the hands of time. These days, I read most of the software manuals, "Read Me" files and other documentation for my programs by looking at them on my screen.
If I need to save a section of an electronic manual for reference or if I want to keep a few paragraphs from a "Read Me" file handy, I create text clippings. Later, I convert those clippings into draft mail messages that I can store in Apple's Mail application. I put them in a folder I created called "Documentation."
I use Apple Mail because I'm always running my e-mail software, so anything stored in it is easy to get to, and because Apple's Mail software has a competent word processor built in. Mail has a quick text search, too, so I simply search within the "Documentation" mail folder when I need to find a reference. Mail automatically searches all text within messages.
Some of this probably sounds geeky. Let me explain it step by step.
A text clipping is created when you drag some text out onto the desktop or into a folder. Any window that has text in it is fair game. Just select some of the text -- drag your mouse over it while holding the button down -- and then click and hold the button. It's important to hold the button down for a second or so. While holding the button down, drag the text out of the window.
Text clippings are the odd guys out on the Mac. They don't belong to a word processor and they never belong to the program you dragged the text from. They are Finder objects. When you double click a text clipping, the Finder opens it instantly. (Tip: If the text clipping window is too small, resize it and close it. The Finder remembers the size and shape next time.)
To copy the text in a text clipping to a draft message, create a new, blank message. Open the text clipping, press Cmd-C and then click inside the new message window and press Cmd-V. Press Cmd-S to save the draft. You can reopen and add to any draft message. Be sure to save it when you're through.
| |