Paste special

[Anders Lund]

On Sunday 16 September 2007, John Tapsell wrote:
> Hey all,
>
>   We need to have some form of "paste special" in many apps.  It would
> be nice to get some ideas now.
>
>   I was thinking, to take an example, in kwrite to have the Edit menu look
> like:
>
>   Undo
>   Redo
>   -----
>   Cut
>   Copy
>   Paste
>   Paste As->
>       Plain text
>       HTML
>       MathML
>       ....
>   -----
>   Select All
>   ....
>
> The idea being that when you expand Paste As, it queries the clipboard
> to find out what mimetypes it offers, then shows them in the drop down
> list.
>
> This would allow us to remove the current option "Copy as HTML", which
> I've never really liked - it should be up the app that pastes to
> decide on how to paste it.  Worst case you can always copy then paste
> as HTML, then copy again :-)

While I think having such a menu is a very good idea, I believe that copying 
into HTML or Latex in Katepart (as an example) is potentially expensive. At 
least we would need to do some benchmarking before deciding!

> Many people don't realise that quite a few kde3 apps do actually use
> the clipboard quite well - if you copy from konqueror, it will provide
>  text/html  on the clipboard.  But there's no way to actually paste
> this as text into an editor.

... and that would be very cool, in kate as well as in kword for example :)

> We could have a similar menu for koffice.
>
> John



-- 
Anders

www: http://www.alweb.dk
jabber: anderslund at jabber.dk