Re: Text paste import with UTF8

[Nick Lamb <njl98r ecs soton ac uk>]

In addition to my earlier question about the Gnumeric clipboard, I am now
reading JWZ's rant on the use of X selections, which seems to be endorsed
by XEmacs, GTK+, Mozilla and Qt >= 3.0

http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html

Gnumeric's behaviour is pretty far from everything else in this regard.
It doesn't seem to use the CLIPBOARD at all, but instead menu operations
like Copy/Cut put things into PRIMARY which is meant only for the current
selection and quickly gets overwritten when a power user is at work.

Since GTK+ 1.2 doesn't provide GDK_SELECTION_CLIPBOARD for some reason
I suggest that the following operation applied across the Gnumeric
core application source (src/*.c) will fix the main problem...

s/GDK_SELECTION_PRIMARY/gdk_atom_intern("CLIPBOARD", FALSE)/

I think this change is simple enough and transparent enough to get into
the Gnumeric 1.0 branch as well as HEAD. You can verify that it worked
by running e.g. gEdit and using the Edit/Paste menu item to paste cell
values from Gnumeric into the editor.

In addition, and possibly much harder, Gnumeric should offer the current
selection in PRIMARY whenever it is explicitly changed, e.g by the user
dragging out a selection with the mouse. This already works for the GTK+
widgets used inside Gnumeic (like the cell text edit widget) but not for
the selection in the sheet itself.

I can file a bug for this latter issue to keep track of it if necessary.

Nick.