Dragging text to desktop drops a PICTURE clipping

[Alexander]

Version: 2004
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
Processor: intel

When I select text in a Word doc, and drag it over to the desktop, I now get a "picture clipping "pictClipping" file instead of a text clipping "textClipping"file. This is new behavior.

It's not the OS; other apps provide the data for the OS to make a textClipping file, just as always. As far as I know, Word and the OS are fully updated.. This seems like a very strange bug...

Is there some default-format switch that has gotten tweaked? What's happening?

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

When I select text in a Word doc, and drag it over to the desktop, I now
get a "picture clipping "pictClipping" file instead of a text clipping
"textClipping"file. This is new behavior.

This is not a bug as far as I am concerned. Word puts together the text
and a bunch of formatting information when you make a clipping. A
regular text clipping cannot host that much information so Word puts it
in a PICT clipping. PICT can be used for far more than just pictures.
These pict clippings can be used for vector-based information and
formatted text. If you drag the clipping to TextEdit, TextWrangler,
BBEdit, etc, it shows up as perfectly editable text there. In TextEdit,
it also has all the formatting attributes it had in Word.

Corentin