Re: [MacPerl] Drag & Drop Text Selection to Droplet Question

[John W Baxter <jwblist@olympus.net>]

At 11:23 -0400 8/13/98, Kevin Reid wrote:
>You can, however, drag a text _clipping_ onto a droplet and it will be
>seen as a file.
>
>TEXT resource 256 will contain the text of the clipping.

Finder builds its clipping files using TEXT 256 for the text content (and
PICT 256 for the PICT if any, and styl 256 for the style information, if
any, etc etc (sounds can be in there too, for example)).  And others
probably should build them that way.

However, a clipping file has an "index" sort of resource, which gives the

   a.  preferred order of the flavors in the clipping
   b.  type of each flavor
   c.  resource ID of each flavor

(That's all in a single array of entries.)

If one fabricates a clipping file which uses other resource IDs, Finder
will happily display it.  If there's a PICT, Finder will display that, even
if it is low in the order of preference (ie, Finder prefers PICT for
display).  As proof of that, I build a clipping file with TEXT, styl, and
PICT flavors in that order, where the PICT was totally unrelated to the
styled text.  Finder displayed the PICT, not the text.

I wrote a Frontier script years ago which built and extracted from clipping
files according to those rules (including such useful things as make a
clipping file from the current scrap ("clipboard"), copy the indicated
clipping file to the clipboard appropriately, and make a clipping out of
the selected text in a Eudora message, offering the first few characters of
the text as a proposed file name.

Along the way to doing that script, I had to write a Frontier extension
which returned the flavors found in the scrap, and built the scrap to order.

<ftp://members.aol.com/jwbaxter2/Clippings_Suite.sit.bin>
for anyone who cares.

   --John
--
John Baxter   jwblist@olympus.net      Port Ludlow, WA, USA
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach him to fish,
and you get rid of him for the weekend.

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