Copy Line to Left deactivated (grayed out)

[PaulW]

BC4 16121 on OSX 10.6.8
I need help with this show stopper:
I created two simple text files, started a new session as a Text Compare, and open one file in left pane and one in right pane. I cannot find a way to "ungray" the Copy Line to Left, Copy to Left, Copy Line to Right, Copy Right actions in the Edit toolbar. Added those tool icons to toolbar, they remain grayed out.

Suspecting a permissions issue, before opening the session, I set the permissions on these .rtf files to "Read/Write for everybody" and for my user (shows as octal 646 in a Terminal session lst -Flag command).

I used Windows BC2 & 3 for 4 years without a hitch. What am I doing wrong?

[Zoë]

.rtf files are "Rich Text Format". They have a lot of text formatting information that we can't handle (fonts, colors, etc), and which we strip out automatically for comparison purposes. Since the conversion is destructive we don't support editing them. Unfortunately TextEdit doesn't support any actual plain text file formats.

[PaulW]

Thanks Craig. Help does not work either. Is that not complete yet, and if so, is there a place I could have found that out without posting to the group? (Did I miss the memo? :-) I type in a search term and hit enter, nothing happens.

[Zoë]

The Help -> Beyond Compare Help menu item should work fine. We haven't fully converted it to work with AppleHelp so the Spotlight search won't work, but the "Search" link on the left navigation panel should. We have not updated the help for BC4 yet. We can make a note about that, but normally it wouldn't be covered; there's *lots* of file types that BC either can't compare or can't edit and we can't mention all of them.