I think the problem was that that advanced clipboards seemed to cause major stability problems. Maybe someone has tackled that. Desktop publishing programs seem to manage them though - call them work areas or whatever.

What's intrinsic in a clipboard that brings instability along with? Memory issues?

I love CuteClips3. That's what I use for my clipboard manager. I could use Alfred - which does a lot of other things, but I got CuteClips before I got Alfred.

I'll have to look at both of those.

Right now I'm using Sublime as a text editor--not for code yet, just docs, and so far, fine. The opening closing quotes thing was a bit startling.

I'm a little confused by the documentation on the web about Lion. If I look up how to uninstall an app, either they're wrong, or my system is weird. Or they're writing about some halcyon time in the future and sending their documents back to July 2012.

When I do the hold-to-jiggle, only the one app I bought in the App Store has an x. Of the first three articles I clicked on about uninstalling only one mentioned this was an option, and it didn't tell you what to do in this case.

What is the terrain actually like out there? Is everyone magically using all App Store apps? Or not uninstalling? Or is it the fourth document that tells them "Oh, just delete it from Applications like before." I mean, it didn't take me long to try it, but why do the help pages not mention it? Why do most of the illustrations show all App Store apps? Is this representative and helpful?

I don't know. Part of it is just that you can fill up the clipboards fast when you have a lot of them (DTP save their "work areas" to disk and they are part of the document. In office I often find that even one item on the office clipboard rather than the windows clipboard can cause a crash. That is XP so maybe no longer a problem in 7. Seems like they would have fixed that before they left XP if it was easy.

And I note that both the 3rd party clipboard managers for the Mac. Windows memory management is maybe a bit harder? Or was at any rate?

There are a lot of clipboard managers for Windows too. I'm assuming LeN's recommending her platform, not the entire market.

And the term "fill the clipboard" can be worked around numerous ways. You can fill a clipboard with one item, if filling is ever a problem, or you can cap the size or number of items, or page, or whatever.

yes. my recommendation is for the mac. I really like it. read the documentation (which is short) and don't try to cut and paste a whole dissertation, and you will get out alive.

I used to have a perfectly functional multi clipboard on Windows 95. I think that it comes down to simplicity for the average user.

I have access to a large data set, that's available as a SGML-tagged text file. It's bibliographic citations, tagged, for example, pointy-bracket au Author's Name close pointy bracket au. They set up the tagging standards in the early 1990s, pretty much freehand, so the data is well-structured but does not follow a now-standard format for bibliographic data.

I'd like, ultimately, to get this data into Zotero. I can currently see a couple of ways to go forward: 1) somehow convert the data into an .ris structure (details on what this is: [link] ). Ris is a pretty basic file structure, using many of the same tags as what I've got. Or 2) get it into an even simpler tab-delimited text file, and upload it into EndNote which takes tab-delimited files (Zotero won't), and then export EndNote to Zotero (easy-peasy).

And advice on which would be easier, converting this SGML into .ris or tab-delimited text? Any advice on how I would actually do this? Is it writing a little script? Because I don't know how to do that right now, but I am interested in learning how, and it seems like this might be a first baby-steps project to learning a scripting language. Would anybody like to be my mentor for this?