Re: [Matplotlib-users] clipboard copy

[Matt N. <new...@ca...>]

Hi,

> It sounds more complicated than I thought. Indeed I was
> searching for existing solutions that would copy the window
> contents into clipboard. I know it is quite easy to do with
> Tcl/Tk and the BLT extension or something similar. You just call
> a function with the window path as arg and your clipboard is
> filled. This is why I focused on TkAgg.

I agree that it would not be that easy with TkAgg. I think you
have to use Tkinter.Canvas.postscript() to get a representation of
the whole canvas.  Then you'd have to convert postscript to a
bitmap that can be copied to the clipboard (using clipboard_copy()
/ clipboard_append()).  I think that's not very easy, as PIL is
not that good with postscript.

It might be easier to switch to the Agg backend and create a
bitmap that can then be copied to the clipboard.  This looks
possible, and might make a more uniform way to copy to clipboard.

By the way, for the WXAgg backend, copy to the clipboard is fairly
simple, as it already provides the bitmap: For a
  canvas = FigureCanvasWxAgg(...)

This works:
  bmp = wx.BitmapDataObject()
  bmp.SetBitmap(canvas.bitmap)
  wx.TheClipboard.Open()
  wx.TheClipboard.SetData(bmp)
  wx.TheClipboard.Close()

Hope that helps,

--Matt