[TextShare] - proposal to make a desktop-wide format for text

[Martin Meyer]

Could the app copying the text set some sort of hint (maybe mime
type?) about the format of the copied text or object? If we could have
a type hint of the copied object and a set of possible types that each
app accepts we might be able to write some converters to get from Type
A to Type B.

For example, say you copy an email out of an email client. The type of
the object in the buffer would be an application/mbox, and the
clipboard might have the ability to copy that into a few other types.
One of these types might be text/plain, and my text editor happens to
like that type. So if I try to copy an email from Evolution and paste
it in my text editor, it automagically converts it into a text
representation of the email.  Also, if I were to copy a contact from
the address book and paste it into the "TO" field of a new email, it
would turn it into a formatted "Name" <address at email.com> string.

Each app would have to order their preferred mime types (i.e. say
which is their first choice), and they may possibly have to ask the
user which they want. I think OpenOffice asks the user, right? So
you're really have your choice when pasting that text whether you
wanted to turn it into plain text or keep the HTML formatting from
that web page you just copied out of...

If this seems like a good idea then the next step would be to specify
which mime types can convert to which others. Might be good to use
independent libraries to implement some of the conversions instead of
writing a converter for everything. Does this seem like overkill?
Maybe...

Martin

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 4:03 AM, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
>
> Le Mar 17 juin 2008 01:47, Liam R E Quin a écrit :
>
>> as a MathML or SVG editor isn't the same as a text editor.
>> But if I select a sentence with bold, italic, a superscript
>> and a right-to-left quotation, and choose Copy, and go to
>> another program, and do Paste, I'd like
>> (1) the same thing to reappear, complete with bold and italic
>> or,
>> (2) the same text, including the superscript and RTL text, but
>>     without the formatting
>
> And please have a setting to make one default desktop-side. Formatted
> text cut & pasting is a major plague in OO.o, one is always wasting
> time un-formatting the result to avoid style contamination.
>
>
> --
> Nicolas Mailhot
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