Clipboard formats and Qt and wxt terminals

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

[Change of subject thread from "Re: Proposal: Saving graphs from Qt and 
wxt terminals"]

On 11/10/2014 10:54 AM, Jun T. wrote:
> 2014/11/09 16:26, Daniel J Sebald<dan...@ie...>  wrote:
>> Jun, do you have some program/application in mind that might accept PDF from the clipboard?
>
> Sorry, I'm not using Linux for creating documents or read/write mails.
>
> On Mac OS X, aquaterm (set term aqua) can copy a plot in PDF, and many apps
> (Pages, Keynote, MS Office, many drawing/graphics apps, etc.) accept it. If I
> paste it to a composing window of Mail.app, it becomes an attachment in PDF.
>
> Probably there are only few gnuplot users on Mac. If so, supporting PDF
> clipboard by wxt/qt on Mac would not be a high priority.
> Aquaterm works fine and, for most of the cases, enough for me.
>
> But I guess copying a plot in a vector format (SVG ?) would also be useful on
> Linux (assuming there are many apps which accept SVG from clipboard).
> Or is this already possible?

Useful?  Probably.  Already possibly?  Don't know.  But from this FAQ on 
something called Inkscape, my guess would be "No" or "Maybe, but not 
fundamentally":

http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Frequently_asked_questions#Copying_and_pasting_in_Inkscape_creates_pixellated_images_instead_of_copying_the_vector_objects

The way the answer is worded suggests that Mac OS X clipboard is more 
robust than X11 clipboard.  That's likely the main difference here, and 
in the case of Linux it sounds like GTK/KDE may have clipboard support 
which is different--my guess being that KDE attempts to extend the X11 
clipboard capabilities more than GTK does.

I've searched for some definitive X11 documentation on the limitations 
and and future changes/additions for clipboard support, e.g.,

https://www.xpra.org/trac/wiki/Clipboard

and I'm none the wiser for it.

The questions I wonder are, Why the X11 clipboard doesn't seem to have 
emerging, more robust support for formats? and Is there something that 
has emerged that serves as a standard for more formats thereby dampening 
the need for X11 to add better support?

Might MIME be something used in clipboards these days?  Here is the MIME 
for svg:

image/svg+xml

The Qt documentation has a discussion about MIME (whereas wxWidgets 
appear not to):

http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qclipboard.html#setMimeData

Quote:

QClipboard features some convenience functions to access common data 
types: setText() allows the exchange of Unicode text and setPixmap() and 
setImage() allows the exchange of QPixmaps and QImages between 
applications. The setMimeData() function is the ultimate in flexibility: 
it allows you to add any QMimeData into the clipboard.

Notice "ultimate in flexibility".  Does that apply only to email 
interchange?  Or does it open the door to many applications on an 
X11-based desktop environment?

Perhaps I'll switch over to Qt terminal and experiment there a bit.

Dan