Re: Clipboard

[Michael ROGERS <M Rogers cs ucl ac uk>]

Thanks for the info. I obviously underestimated the X clipboard.  :)

>It already 'know's the datatype.  e.g. xterm -u8 (on recent Xfree
>releases) can select/paste UTF-8 strings, and gnome-terminal can
>accept them if it is in UTF-8 mode, otherwise it falls back to
>STRING's - the target of a paste requests the data in a given
>datatype, and if the selection owner can provide it in that datatype,
>they do.  Otherwise the target can request a 'lesser' datatype, until
>either it finds something its happy with, or it doesn't get anything
>from the selection owner.

So how about a generic target (such as a scratch area) which can accept
multiple data types? Is there a way for the target to specify "any" and let
the selection owner choose, or does it have to guess each datatype in turn?

Also, is there a way to copy data from an application, close the application,
and still have that data on the clipboard? Or does that depend on the 
clipboard implementation?


Michael Rogers