Off-topic: FoldingText icon thumbnail

1

Why hello there!

It’s a wacky question, but I’ve searched - extensively - to no avail, and so posting in this forum is very much a last resort.

For an .ft file when viewed in Finder in Icons view, the icon displays a thumbnail of the contents of the file - with an ‘FT’ displayed at the bottom of the thumbnail. (Much like ‘HTML’ document thumbnails, and various other file extensions.)

How did you get the ‘FT’ there! Is it the result of a property in Info.plist? I see that FoldingText (which is a great app, by the way), doesn’t include it’s own qlGenerator - and so I’m guessing it’s a property somewhere.

It’s rare that googling a thousand paraphrased terms doesn’t produce the right result, but this is definitely one of those times - and so I here am in desperation :slight_smile:

I would greatly appreciate any hints - or answers, even!

2

Ha, I’m not actually sure what you mean. Can you post a small screenshot showing what you mean?

3

Thank you very much for the prompt response! Wow.

I’ve attached a screenshot from my desktop.

I had a feeling you would wonder what I’m talking about, because I think it’s a native feature to Mac OS based upon a setting in FoldingText’s configuration. I just don’t know which!

If you’re not sure, I suppose I can guess that you didn’t code anything in particular - which is still handy in terms of deduction!

4

Ahh, I think that’s provided by the system. I see the same thing applied to lots of different text file types… they all seem to put the file extension over the icon preview. I would guess it’s behavior provided by the public.plain-text preview generator.

Here’s an example of how I defined my UTI:

	<key>UTTypeConformsTo</key>
	<array>
		<string>public.plain-text</string>
	</array>
	<key>UTTypeDescription</key>
	<string>TaskPaper Formatted Text</string>
	<key>UTTypeIconFile</key>
	<string>TaskPaperDocument</string>
	<key>UTTypeIdentifier</key>
	<string>com.taskpaper.text</string>
	<key>UTTypeTagSpecification</key>
	<dict>
		<key>public.filename-extension</key>
		<array>
			<string>taskpaper</string>
		</array>
	</dict>
5

That did the trick! Once you confirmed that you didn’t do anything special, I looked more closely at my plist configuration, including your excerpt from above - and managed to make it work!

I believe the issue was that I was setting these fields in the info.plist for the qlgenerator rather than the app itself, in addition to some other small discrepancies.

Thank you very much for your time, spontaneity and assistance, Jesse. This felt like a little private chat with you!