TextEdit 1.4: Three "Wannabe" Questions

Question

Hello, friends —
I use TextEdit a lot — accepting the tradeoff of ~lean-and-mean vs. restricted features... mostly.
But I'm wondering if fellow Mac folk can offer a few how-to's or tricks to solve:
(a)   Often when I cut-and-paste from, e.g., an online document into a TextEdit file, anything indented is automatically morphed into bullet-format. This is often very time-consuming to edit out.
As a ~simple example, if I copy KnowledgeBase article 303382 into a TextEdit file, every line from "apachemodphp" to "iChat... file transfers" becomes bulleted text.
(b)   Sometimes I'd like to highlight a few words of text. The only way I know to highlight text in TextEdit — so far — is to create a table from an entire ¶ of text, then use Table »» Cell Background »» Color Fill. Doesn't work for a word or phrase.
Yet when I paste highlighted text into a TextEdit file, no problemo...
(c)   Working with tables — well, mysterious behavior abounds. I often face situations where a table's/column's right-hand "border" is not amenable to adjustment — particularly enlarging. Everything in that & all columns to the left truncate — the opposite of what's intended. Sometimes I can help this — for a single row — by adding a return, but usually it's "no go."
Ideas?
Thanks grandly!
Dean

Answer 1

Hi, Dean.
(a) Try Edit > Paste and Match Style (Command-Option-Shift-V). What you paste will then match the document's style vs. the Styled Text that was copied to the clipboard. You could also work with a plain-text document instead of a Rich Text document if preserving styles is not necessary.
(b) By "highlight" it sounds like you mean as if using a highlighter on a paper document. Your approach appears to be the only way to do this in TextEdit. However, my favorite text editor supports this function in spades: Tex-Edit Plus. It's shareware, more along the lines of "honorware." That is, last I checked, it worked even if you never registered, but I can tell you it's worth the inexpensive registration. The author is a nice fellow and the code is superb. It puts TextEdit to shame!
Note the highlighting done in Tex-Edit only shows up in Tex-Edit, so if you save the file and then open it in another editor, you don't see the highlighting. I'm OK with that since Tex-Edit is my default text editor.
What I like most about Tex-Edit, besides its rich set of features like highlighting, is that it can be scripted extensively using AppleScript. I've done some amazing things with AppleScript in Tex-Edit.
You can also do highlighting in Adobe Acrobat and, if memory serves, even the free Adobe Reader. Get your document as you like, print to PDF, then perform your highlights in Acrobat Reader and save the highlighted PDF.
Other than that, simply try different font colors or style (bold, italic) in place of color background highlighting.
(c) Tables are not TextEdit's strength, even less so when you import documents from other apps, e.g. Word, containing tables. Try switching between Format > Wrap to Window and Format > Wrap to Page to see if that helps when you run into the problem you've described.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X