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

[Kevin Krammer]

On Thursday 19 June 2008, François Revol wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Well, other candidates could be possible, like PDF, but it doesn't
> maintain a real logical sturcture AFAIK.

I am not sure PDF would be a good format for data that is still supposed to be 
edited.

> > 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.
>
> BeOS/Haiku spreadsheets can use text/x-csv or something I think...

CSV is just not a good solution, since it requires a lot of "knowledge" on the 
receiver side, e.g. which character/string is used as a delimiter, if cells 
containing it are quoted or if the delimiter is escaped, how it is escaped, 
etc.

> But it should be easy to add others. OOo format would be a little
> harder until it's ported and a translator for it is written though.

I don't think any application specific formats should even be considered, 
especially not when the application in question has already changed away from 
it (OOo uses ODF now).

I have to admit that I might have misunderstood the purpose of the thread, 
since some other comments indicate that other people understand it as looking 
for solutions regarding simple formatting, not HTML or word processor like 
separation of structure and style.

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