Plain text format? Getting rich text - don't want it.

[Andrew Morris]

I have switched to OS X from Windows, and had issues with textedit so I switched to TextWrangler. 

Copying and editing some scripts i found, I saved them as UTF-8 (Unix CRLF) - as that was my simplest choice. They look like text in TextEdit, but Terminal shows the @ symbol, and looking at the extended attributes the files are listed as Rich Text.

How do I save a file as plain text - something easy to do in Notepad and other Windows editors. 

There must be an easy trick I am missing. 

Thanks,

Andrew

[Patrick Woolsey]

On 8/28/14 at 5:56 PM, andre...@gmail.com (Andrew Morris) wrote:

>I have switched to OS X from Windows, and had issues with
>textedit so I switched to TextWrangler.
>Copying and editing some scripts i found, I saved them as UTF-8
>(Unix CRLF) - as that was my simplest choice. They look like
>text in TextEdit, but Terminal shows the @ symbol, and looking
>at the extended attributes the files are listed as Rich Text.
>

>How do I save a file as plain text [...]


For background, since plain text is a matter of content, while
extended attributes are file metadata, a file can certainly be
plain text and still have extended attributes; for example "com.apple.TextEncoding".

Next, if you initially created some RTF file(s) in TextEdit, you
will need to use TextEdit to convert those file(s) from RTF to
plain text, since TextWrangler doesn't speak RTF :-) -- however,
once you have done that, you can then just keep editing those
files in TextWrangler with no further concerns, regardless of
what xattrs TextEdit applied.

If however you did create the file(s) in question with
TextWrangler, could you please drop an email to tech support
<sup...@barebones.com> as we'll need to gather some more information.


Regards,

Patrick Woolsey
==
Bare Bones Software, Inc. <http://www.barebones.com/>

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

On Aug 29, 2014, at 7:48, Patrick Woolsey <pwoo...@barebones.com> wrote:

Next, if you initially created some RTF file(s) in TextEdit, you will need to use TextEdit to convert those file(s) from RTF to plain text, since TextWrangler doesn't speak RTF :-)

Which is done with a single shortcut: Shift+Cmd+T.

The same shortcut is used to to reverse the process.

Jean-Christophe Helary 

[Andrew]

Thanks for the feedback - i copied some code off a website, pasted it into TextWrangler and saved it. Let me try to duplicate and see if I can do illustrate easily - I wound up just using vi and pasted into a shell a window to get past my issues - but it would be nice to use a real editor. 

I will email support if i can easily duplicate the issue.

Thanks!

Andrew

[jwriter]

I think there is an easy solution that does not require TextWrangler.  It's also possible I don't completely understand the problem but here is my suggestion for TextEdit Ver 1.6.  I call this process laundering text.

1. Open your RTF file with preferences as follows:
Preferences > Open and Save > When opening a file > Uncheck: Ignore rich text commands in RTF files
RTF formatting will be displayed.

2. Select all and copy the text to the clipboard.

3. Open a new text file with preferences set as follows, and paste in the text.
Preferences > New Document > Format > Select: Plain text

4. Save the new file.

If possible please post a reply and let me know if this works.