I just discovered something I have never heard or seen before (maybe I just missed it) while testing this hint. I wanted to see just what woudl happen if I dropped an .rtfd file on the Safari icon... nothing... Safari won't even accept the drag. So I thought I would get a little sneaky and change the .rtfd extension on the file to ".rtf" to see if that would fool Safari.... to my amazement, when I accepted the "Are you sure you want to add..." dialog... the Finder proceeded to create a dir in the same location as my original rtfd file and named original-filename.rtf and fill it with and rtf version of the file and extracted graphics from the file. It also works in reverse - if you change the name of the name of the dir containing the rtf and image files back to original-filename.rtfd, the Finder converts it back to an rtfd file!

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That's because an RTFD "file" actually is a directory. The finder isn't doing any "conversion" aside from changing the filename. The Finder knows that a folder with a ".rtfd" extension is supposed to be shown as a file, so it shows it as one. When the extension isn't ".rtfd" then the Finder doesn't know that it's an RTFD document so it shows it as a normal folder.

Note that if you want to see the contents of the folder even when the extension is ".rtfd" you can right-click on it and choose "Show Package Contents" to open the directory.

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Tim Buchheim

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What happens if you hold Option-Command as you drag the .rtfd document on Safari's Icon?

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I'm a newbie Applescripter using this hint as a way of solving a scripting problem, but it's still not working. I am trying to write a routine that, given an rtfd file, returns the rtf within.

This is what I have so far:

tell application "Finder"
activate SourceFolder
set the name of file (CurrentTitle & ".rtfd") to CurrentTitle
open folder CurrentTitle
set the name of file "TXT.rtf" to (CurrentTitle & ".rtf")
move file (CurrentTitle & ".rtf") to SourceFolder
end tell

I get an error "Can't set name of file ..."

Any suggestions?

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Why not just leave TextEdit running?

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I don't like to leave stuff running that I'm not using. Sure, I leave BBEdit open all the time, but I use that frequently enough to warrant it. I just don't use TextEdit, except to view .rtfd documents, and I see one of those about every other week, so the dock real-estate and the RAM usage (minimal as it is) aren't worth it.

I just don't really like TextEdit.

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