Hello Ingo, I believe that looking at TranslationUtils.h may be helpful in answering your question. Also you can look at the OBOS StyledEdit which uses this mechanism to save and load files. In particular there are these three functions and some possibly helpful comments: GetStyledText, PutStyledText, WriteStyledEditFile There is also the possibility of trying a dynamic_cast to BFile* and if it succeeds then you know you have attribute access via the traditional mechanism. Andrew -----Original Message----- From: "Ingo Weinhold" <bonefish@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2002 14:36:39 CET (+0100) [snip] Now what I wonder is, when does StyledEdit write out its own format? I've never got it to write anything else than a plain text with style information in the attributes. And this is obviously not suitable for the translation service, as it deals only with BPositionIOs. CU, Ingo