Re: Copy to clipboard for Linux

[Dave D. <dde...@es...>]

Ethan A Merritt <merritt@u.washington.edu> writes:

> 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.
>

I understand that. I'm really just interested (and more as an academic
interest) in the assertion that we send all the correct X requests, in
the correct order, to the X server, yet the client that requested the
selection sometimes fails to get the data. It breaks my internal model
of how X works, and that troubles me. An extra XFlush simply should
not change the behaviour like this.


> 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).

Sure. While I was working at Citrix, we came up with (yet another)
helper app that was intended to iron out some of the difficulties.
Back then, hardly any X apps could do any kind of graphics cut/paste -
it's nice to hear that things are starting to change.

(It looks like the helper is still bundled with the unix ica client,
which is free for download, in case anyone's interested...)


dd
-- 
Dave Denholm              <dde...@es...>       http://www.esmertec.com