Section 73. Create a New Text Document

73. Create a New Text Document

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

2 Find, Launch, and Quit an Application

19 Move, Copy, or Delete a Document or Folder

SEE ALSO

18 Set a Color Label

94 Access Your Desk Accessories (Dashboard)

Even today, text documents are the bread and butter of computing. Whether you use your computer for video editing, email, gaming, or photography, you've most likely also found indispensable the ability to enter some quick textual notes into a documenta shopping list, a phone number, a description of the dream you had last nightand while there are specialized applications designed to handle each of these situations, nothing is more versatile than the good old-fashioned text file.

Text documents can take two forms: plain text and rich text . A plain text document has nothing in it but the letters , numbers , and other characters you typeno special formatting, pictures, defined fonts ( typefaces ), or other complications. A rich text document, however, can have styled text (text in bold, in italics, underlined , or in different fonts), special paragraph formatting, pictures, page layout information, and much more. Most of the features though of as being part of word processing are made possible with the support of rich text.

KEY TERM

Plain text A document containing only letters, numbers, and other typed characters, but no special formatting such as boldface, italics, paragraph styles, or different fonts.

Rich text A document containing text styled in any number of ways, including different fonts, paragraph styles, boldface, italics, or even pictures and tables. In some applications (such as Mail), HTML formatting is referred to as rich text.

Word processing A term that generally refers to creating and editing documents with rich text content, formatted for attractive printing; it also includes operational features such as text block editing, spell-checking, and style management.

Mac OS X lets you create documents in either of these two formats, using the built-in TextEdit application, a handy little word-processing program with some surprising capabilities. Plain text files are more versatile in many waysyou can transfer them from one platform to another, open them in very simple applications (such as Notepad in Windows), serve them from a web server to be shown natively in a browser, and so on. But rich text documentswhich Mac OS X can save in RTF (Rich Text Format), HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), or Microsoft Word formatmust be opened in more specialized software, such as Word.

73. Create a New Document

1.	Open TextEdit Open a Finder window, navigate to the Applications folder, and double-click the TextEdit icon.
2.	Create a New Document When TextEdit launches, a new blank document window appears, with simple formatting controls and tab markings at the top. (The presence of these controls means that TextEdit is in rich text mode.) TIP To create a new document from scratch, choose New from the File menu. You can now type text into the window, format it using the displayed controls and the Format menu, print the file's contents, and so on. TIP Double-click a word in any selectable block of text in any Mac OS X application, and the whole word will become selected. Triple-click and the entire paragraph will be selected.
3.	Convert to Plain Text This step is optional. At any point while the document is open, if you want, you can convert it to plain text mode. You might choose to do this if you want to use the document in a web page, at the Unix Terminal command line, or another such application that can only handle plain text. To convert the open document to plain text, choose Format, Make Plain Text .
4.	Save the Document Before you invest too much time in creating a text document, you should save the file to your hard disk. Saving files periodically as you're working on them is an excellent habit to get into. Select Save from the File menu. The Save dialog box appears. Type a filename, select a location for the document, and (if it's a rich text document) choose which formatRTF, HTML, or Microsoft Word formatto save it in. (If you converted the document to Plain Text mode in step 3, this option is not available.) You can also choose whether or not to hide the filename extension; the Hide Extension check box is automatically selected or deselected depending on the filename you type. Whatever you enter in the Save As box is how the filename will be displayed. If you don't type the extension, an appropriate one is added automatically to the filename and hidden. NOTE The standard extensions are .txt for plain text documents, .rtf for Rich Text Format documents, .html for HTML documents, and .doc for Microsoft Word documents.
5.	Create a Document from Selected Text If you already have some text in another application that you want to turn into a text document, there's a quick one-step way of doing it. Select the text you want to save and open the application menu (in the example shown here, I'm saving a chunk of text I found on a web page with Safari). From the Services submenu, select TextEdit , and then select New Window Containing Selection . A new TextEdit window will appear with the selected text in it. You can then save the text as a new file, print it, or do whatever else you want.