Re: Copy to clipboard for Linux

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> 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.

Rant is good characterization, as there is little regarding X other than to describe pretty much what the documentation calls out.  The person is saying there is no actual saving to a clipboard.  Right.  (Hence having to write the handle_event routine.)  There are two of them.  Right.  TIMESTAMP?  In the X documentation.  Any complaints about the CLIPBOARD/PRIMARY X selection scheme seem more along that of having to program things one's self.

It isn't until discussing the clipboard client where the person starts talking about bugs.  A clipboard client is something that keeps a history of things sent to an actual clipboard, that the ranter so desires apparently.  That way, after you close your program, stuff will still be available in a clipboard somewhere.

That has nothing to do with Gnuplot.

I assume any clipboard client still needs to use CLIPBOARD/PRIMARY mechanisms, otherwise it is rewriting the X standard and we'd have to compile under something else or use different libraries or something.

> 
> 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.

That's not my experience.  I've worked on HPs and Suns and PCs running X.  I've consistently been able to select stuff and copy it with a center mouse click to other locations.  I see now that GIMP appears to be an acception.

Dan