TextEdit docs opened in MacOS 12.6 Monterey are garbled

jfgaylord wrote:

Does Font Book know if a font is incompatible?

It should. It has a pretty standard "error check". By that I mean that if Font Book says a font is incompatible, then it is definitely incompatible. But just because Font Book doesn't show that message doesn't mean that any 3rd party font will work. Sometimes there are just wonky fonts.

I definitely will need to install some (I know, not Helvetica alternates !!!).

Check here for additional fonts that are available as document support fonts or downloadable fonts: Fonts included with macOS Monterey - Apple Support

Thanks for posting.

I opened this in two different macs, both running Ventura.

It looks the same in both. The first line says "HEALTH CARE", and it has some text in black, also some text in pinkk.

Here is a screenshot of an excerpt.

Does it look like it was supposed to?

I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you have already checked that Monterey's TextEdit was not configured to open documents as text, instead of Rich Text Format (.rtf), or that those documents were not originally Teach/SimpleText dinosaurs from classic macOS.

I have High Sierra and El Capitan at home but am on the road and several hours away from further testing on this matter.

Can you open those .rtf/.rtfd documents with the Bean word processor?

Then, there is something about those documents, and not Bean or TextEdit. What is the actual file extension on that file?

I just used the current version of Bean on macOS Ventura 13.3.1 to open both .rtf and .rtfd from several years ago. Thus, the problem is not Bean or TextEdit, but corrupted documents, or documents that are some other format than what you think they are.

Place one of this documents on your Desktop, and then launch the Terminal application. Enter the following at the Terminal prompt, where filename is the actual name of the document on your Desktop:

cd ~/Desktop
file --mime-type filename
head -n1 <<<"$(< filename)"
#  {\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1671\cocoasubrtf600

You should see something similar to the last commented output if it really is a .rtf file.

No cats were harmed in this example.

VikingOSX wrote:

Then, there is something about those documents, and not Bean or TextEdit. What is the actual file extension on that file?

I just used the current version of Bean on macOS Ventura 13.3.1 to open both .rtf and .rtfd from several years ago. Thus, the problem is not Bean or TextEdit, but corrupted documents, or documents that are some other format than what you think they are.

Place one of this documents on your Desktop, and then launch the Terminal application. Enter the following at the Terminal prompt, where filename is the actual name of the document on your Desktop:

cd ~/Desktop

file --mime-type filename

head -n1 <<<"$(< filename)"

# {\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1671\cocoasubrtf600

You should see something similar to the last commented output if it really is a .rtf file.

No cats were harmed in this example.

I am curious: is there any reason the last command above should be using the much shorter notation below?

head -1 filename

jfgaylord wrote:

Terminal returned: {\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1561\cocoasubrtf610

I doubt the documents are corrupted since all of them appear normally when opened with TextEdit on my three older MacOS systems incl. High Sierra, El Capitan, and 10.6.8 – even after I have opened them on my Monterey system (without doing any editing).

The output from Terminal also suggests that the files are fine.

Did you try opening one of those files while booted in Safe Mode? Does it make any difference?

And I also got a reprimand for suggesting the way to post. Unfortunately the enforcement of the rules causes us some grief even though we may mean well. I do understand that posting links can be a risk and thus it is frowned upon by the moderators, and links swiftly removed. Fortunately the link still got to me in the e-mail before it was removed.

That's odd.

I do not have a Monterey mac to test on. In my Ventura mac, Command-B works as expected.

Does pressing Command-B highligt the Format menu in your mac? Could it be that Command-B is assigned to something else?

Luis Sequeira1 wrote:

I do not have a Monterey mac to test on. In my Ventura mac, Command-B works as expected.

Does pressing Command-B highligt the Format menu in your mac? Could it be that Command-B is assigned to something else?

Works fine on Monterey here. I even made an effort to create a RTFD document to test.

I'm skeptical of the OP's claim that the same documents work fine on older versions. The only way to be sure of that would be if those files were on an external drive being moved between different computers.

My guess is that they are simply corrupt. An RTFD document is a document container. It is a folder of other documents. Any kind of sync tool can easily corrupt them. Any network use will corrupt them. RTFD is not really a stable, supported format. If these files work on High Sierra and the OP has a High Sierra machine still running, they should be immediately converted into something more modern.