Re: mc Digest, Vol 101, Issue 10

[Theodore Kilgore <kilgota banach math auburn edu>]

On Fri, 28 Sep 2012, chris glur wrote:

> }}Man, this rocks! Excellent job. Many problems and solutions discussed plus a
> lot of tips. And I like the presentation. I am proud to see LaTeX still leads
>   to beautiful products. {{

Yes, it does. I am a mathematician, had to learn to use LaTex years ago, 
and still use it routinely.

> I vote for apartheid between the art-students and the computer-scientists.
> Surely nc/mc's intention was NOT to be arty.
> Which differs from "to be NOT arty". English is real crap. It's too arty.
> mc is for utility. We don't want to PAY for art.
> How much energy is needed to eg. extract text from your  *.pdf/latex and
> insert it in email or USEnet or fax?

That part ought to be easy. Open a PDF file, and you ought to be able to 
do a mouse-copy of any part of the text and copy it into a text-based 
e-mail. Details of the procedure:

Open your mail program (I use apine these days) in an xterm.
Fire up something like xpdf (file.pdf) in another xterm.
Find the text you want to copy. Then mouse over it while holding down the 
left mouse button. If you start at the top left corner of whatever you 
want to copy and end at the bottom right corner, you will end up with a 
highlighted rectangular block.
Then go over to the other xterm, where you are working on a mail to send 
to someone, and click the middle mouse button. The text within the 
highlighted block will then appear in your mail, starting at whatever 
point the cursor was in the mail program when you hit the middle button.

What is actually being used here, by the way, is basic functionality which 
is built into X. It is perhaps unfortunate that lots of people do not know 
this can be done with any X-conformant program. I myself did not know, for 
example, that it can be done for several years after I started to use 
Linux and X. The propagation of knowledge about this feature seems to 
proceed by the transmission of old folklore from those who know to those 
who apparently do not yet know, on an ad-hoc basis as is happening right 
now. 

A similar transmission of old folklore was what informed me about this 
years ago. There was one of those sometimes-recurring discussions out 
there somewhere, started by someone moaning that X on Linux "lacks" the 
ability to do cut and paste. Some old timer pointed out that cut and paste is a 
fundamental feature of X. It just isn't done using Cntrl-C and Cntrl-V as 
it is in some other operating system, but instead it is done by using the 
mouse. Several people did not want to believe the old timer and said so in 
their responses. Me, I went and tried it, and it worked perfectly. 

As far as the specific case of copying from a PDF into an e-mail is 
concerned, my most recent use of that was yesterday evening. The  
piece I copied was a rectangle containing a block of text from the right 
hand column of a two-column document, and I put it right into the e-mail.
Thus, I assume that the same procedure would work equally well for you.

You can also use the mouse to copy, of course, from one linux terminal to 
another. Unfortunately, you can not copy out of X to a linux terminal by 
mouse-highlighting and then switching to the linux terminal. Neither can 
you copy from a linux terminal into an X session. Also if you have opened 
a file in a linux terminal with the mc viewer or editor you can mousecopy 
into it or from it to another linux terminal. But when mc is running in 
the terminal you have to push a Shift key while doing something with the 
mouse.

A recent feature (which is irritating because it is a new behavior) is 
that you still need to press the Shift key even if mc is put into the 
background with Cntrl-O. Until the most recent version of mc this used not 
to be the case. That is, if you put mc in the background and then started 
an app (an editor, for example) and you wanted to copy into it from 
another linux terminal, then one used not to need to remember that mc is 
running in the background. But now you have to remember that and use the 
shift key. I am sorry for this change and consider it more or less of 
a recently introduced bug. But I guess that I will simply have to adjust. 

Hope that the above helps. Happy mouse-copying.

Theodore Kilgore