Garbage title on an OOP file
 

This morning I found, embedded in an OmniOutliner Pro file, another OOP file that when accessed showed a title full of the garbage characters I was now familiar with from my testing yesterday, but heretofore had only seen on AppleWorks files.

The title was originally "Medpro-X"
and now it was "1__#$!@%!#__Medpro-X.oo3".

more ".oo3" confusion
 

Okay, that suffix doesn't mean the file is crippled. What does it mean?

Now that I know the difference between embedding files and attaching them, I'm careful to hold down the control key when I want attachment.

When I do that, I always get an icon with the little "alias" arrow in the bottom left corner. But sometimes the label has ".oo3" after the name, and sometimes not, even when they both have the alias arrow.

What's happening?

".oo3" just means "this is an OmniOutliner 3 file". Most files on Mac OS X have a file name extension like that. ".mp3" is a sound recording, ".txt" is one kind of text file, and ".rtf" is another text file format.

Since this information is more useful to the computer than it is to most people, I believe Mac OS X defaults to hiding the extension. If you do a Get Info on a file, there's a checkbox in the "Name & Extension" section of the window that appears which controls that behavior. I suspect that OmniOutliner is also looking at that setting and showing/hiding the file name extension, as well.