Re: GNUstep paste board (Was: really attracting developers)

[Fred Kiefer]

Charles Philip Chan schrieb:
> On 2006-08-27 15:41:37 -0400 Fred Kiefer <fredkiefer@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>> Could you please detail the problem you found with GNUstep paste 
>> board?
>> At least in a Unix/Linux environment I would expect GNUstep to play
>> nicely with other apps that follow the basic rules. If you found a
>> problem I am willing to look into this.
> 
> It works for basic text, but not for other data types. I can't speak 
> for other platforms, but on an X based system I think this should 
> happen:
> 
> (1) If a bitmap graphics is cut or copied, it should make a png copy 
> to the X clipboard.
> 
> (2) If it is a font, copy it to the X clipboard as a TTf.
> 
> This is in accordance with the Free Desktop standard. Please refer to 
> this page:
> 
>       http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fClipboardsWiki
> 
> Other data types should follow as the standard evolves.
> 

I am a bit unsure, how much of this is already a standard or at least
widely used. But having image exchange in GNUstep would surely be nice.
One problem here is that GNUstep can only convert NSImages to TIFF, but
not to PNG. Perhaps it would be a start to be able to read PNG from the
pasteboard, which should not be too hard to implement.
As for the font format, I think it is actually a very bad idea to copy
the real font, in what ever format, onto the clipboard. What should be
put there are the font properties, just like GNUstep does it :-)

> 
>> Yes, here there is still much to do. The strange thing is that up to 
>> now
>> people only rarely asked for this.
> 
> Strange indeed since DND is used widely in NeXTStep. :-)
> 

DND will be another big step. Here a whole rewrite is needed. When we
tried to integrate GNUstep DND with X we did get it completely wrong the
first time.

>> It almost is there :-) Really, but we need to improve on it.
> 
> I think the problem stems from incorrect Postscript font names in the 
> generated ps data. I have tested it out and Ghostscript chokes on 
> them.
> 

Yes, this is the biggest remaining problem, but it does not look to hard
to resolve, somebody will just have to take a deep look into a PS
specification and then hard code it into GSStreamContext.