I don’t know what happened with the stationery / templating system in Mac OS X but it got broken a few versions ago.
Today, if you mark your beautiful template as stationery, when you subsequently open it it creates and saves a copy of the file under the same name with the word “Copy” appended, in the same directory.
This so does not make sense. First, people often to store templates a central repository of tools, outside any project. That is not where you want your new project-related instance to be. Moving it to the right location is an added, unnecessary step. Secondly, the name of the template is never going to be the right name. If the user doesn’t think to change it immediately it will cause confusion and make it hard to find the document. That’s more unnecessary work, including closing the document you just created to move and rename it and then reopening it. These required steps make the stationery worse than useless — it’s less work to just manually copy a template file to the destination.
The better behavior (to steal) is to instantiate a new, unsaved, untitled document when the stationery file is opened. Later, when the user saves, it she can give it the right name and put it in the right location the first time. In other words, just like how untitled documents have always worked.
[Didn't stationery once work like this? Anyone have insight into how and why it went astray?]
Here is the workaround I’ve been using for a while. Never use the Stationery bit. Do mark templates as Locked bit. This will have almost the correct behavior. When you open it, it will look like you are editing the template. But it will prevent you from saving over it, instead prompting you for a save location and name.
[Bonus idea to steal #1: why can't the File Save dialog give instant access to the Finder windows that are already open? These are the most likely save destinations because they relate to the current project.]
[Bonus idea to steal #2: When you do Save As, why must it give you what amounts to an arbitrary default save location? Why not default to the current folder? This would match the scenario of retaining an old version of a document while branching it for further editing.]
I’ve been puzzling over this same problem for awhile now, and for some reason I can’t find much about it when I do a Google search. It’s true that stationary docs *did* open an untitled copy in the past. Why the change?
My workaround has been to put the stationary document in a stack, accessed from the dock (or even put the stationary doc in the dock directly). When I open the stationary doc through the dock in this way, it functions as it should – an untitled doc opens. When I double-click from the finder, it makes the copy as you described at the beginning of the article.
Would love to see a fix for this sometime!
Thanks for the tip.
I wish I knew why they changed the stationery feature!