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

[Kevin Krammer]

On Tuesday 17 June 2008, Liam R E Quin wrote:

> For this to work, we need cross-desktop agreement on a format
> for the text.  Since most clipboard mechanisms let applications
> give a list of available formats, this format need not be the
> only (or even preferred) format for all applications, but it
> should be widely supported.

IMHO a suitable candidate would be OpenDocument.
The destination program can selectively, depending on its capabilities, 
extract any level of details, e.g. just the content, basic formatting, etc.

Especially if one considers not only text made of words, but also situations 
where currently a text based exchange is used for structured data, e.g. 
tables formatted as CSV, or text data is mixed with non-text data, e.g. 
copying a selection in a browser, including images.

In any case I recommend having a documentation of best practices, e.g. in 
which order the source should advertise formats, or if targets should check 
the formats in a specific order, etc.

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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