Re: c&p from gnumeric

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, Zbigniew Chyla wrote:

> On Tue, 2001-06-19 at 19:10:22, Almer S. Tigelaar wrote:
>
> > (...)
> > Indeed, the problem is probably that we need to get the plugins to write
> > their data not to a file (which they all do now), but to
> > memory. This isn't overly hard but requires some modifications to the
> > plugins themselves and the plugin subsystem.
>
> I disagree. We need _another_ interface for importing/exporting data
> from/to X selection. For example, when saving HTML file, we want the whole
> HTML document (together with global styles, etc.). When exporting HTML via
> X selection, we want only <table> tag and we can't use global styles (we
> should be able to paste the data in terminal and use it as part of other
> HTML document).

 I think that the data we export to as HTML should be as rich (in formatting
terms) as possible. If X selection support is written in a proper way (as
mature X apps do), the X atom for data presented as HTML will be something
like "text/html", so no other program besides visual html editors or word
processors (that specially check whether X selection is available in
"text/html" format) will be able to paste data as "text/html" - since by
default all text widgets look for X selection formats named "STRING" or
"COMPOUND_TEXT" and the like.

 If one wants to get raw HTML bytes of the selected part of the document for
plain application that doesn't check for presence of "text/html" format of X
selection -  such as gedit - one needs to create new gnumeric document, paste
selection into it, and export that temporary document to html. Or hack the
app to support "Paste special" operation that allows to select in which
of available X selection formats to paste data.

 Alas it's boring to design and code properly and only few choose to do
this...

 Best regards,
  -Vlad