Dan Frakes, who runs Macworld's MacGems section, emailed me an interesting tidbit about text clippings. Dan writes:
Open a large text clipping. When you move the mouse cursor over the text in the clipping, it *looks* like a text-highlight cursor. Now 'highlight' some text and copy it (by using Command-C). The text will never actually highlight, but when you paste into another application, you'll see that the text was indeed copied!For those who aren't familiar with the term, text clippings are little snippets of text that you create by dragging a chunk of text from within an application and then dropping it on your desktop (or other folder). For the longest time in OS X, these clippings weren't nearly as useful as they were in OS 9 -- you couldn't copy the text of the clipping, leaving drag-and-drop as the only means of working with them. Then, in 10.3, Apple finally restored the ability to copy text clippings. You still couldn't select text within the clipping for copying, but at least you could copy the whole thing.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060721035443569