Re: Copy to clipboard for Linux

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Wednesday 19 July 2006 04:46 am, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> 
> > If someone can summarise the problem, and simple steps to reproduce, I
> > can try to find some time to investigate. (Ideally, the steps would
> > not require KDE or gnome or such, since I generally just use fvwm.)

Problem:

   Commonly used desktops do radically different things with the X clipboard.

See, for example, this rant about incompatible clipboard handling under
various versions of KDE.

   http://www.kdedevelopers.org/taxonomy/term/44?from=20

I read a similar rant somewhere about incompatible clipboard handling by
OpenOffice, but can't find it again at the moment.

This is not a problem we can solve in gnuplot, and I really don't
think it's worth a lot of time spent on the attempt. To convince yourself
of this, I suggest you try out cut-and-paste operations between other
applications besides gnuplot.  I am pretty sure you will find they all
suffer the same issues.  I can tell you from sad experience that it is
frustrating to the point of unusability to clip graphics from Acrobat and
paste into Gimp or Powerpoint(via Wine).  It works, sometimes, or doesn't
work, more often, depending on which machine I'm on, what versions of
the various programs and desktop environments are there, and the phase of
the moon.  The Windows and Mac crowds can justifiably snicker; this
aspect of X desktop environments is seriously broken.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742