miller@applix.com (Dan Miller [ext 362]) (03/14/91)
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Summary: Looking for information on emerging Clipboard standards for
atoms/properties representing complex, formatted text with attributes.
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Greetings! I am currently working with an X-based document composition
system (a fancy text editor) that deals with complex, highly formatted
text. Within a given paragraph of text, fonts and text attributes (e.g.
bold, italic, underline) can be specified on a per-character basis.
Any given paragraph can be assigned arbitrary left and right margin values,
multiple tab stop values, and can even wrap into multiple columns.
Multiple paragraphs make up a "document", which can also contain forced
page breaks, page headers and footers, graphics insets, etc. You get
the idea.
Currently, when the user marks a chunk of a document and cuts or copies
it elsewhere, one of two clipboard formats is used:
1. If "elsewhere" is our document composition system (i.e. the same
window, or another window running our DCS), we use our own private atom,
in DCS file format, so we get a "perfect" copy.
2. Otherwise we generate simple ASCII text and dump it into the
XA_STRING atom format.
If the user pastes into our DCS, we use data from our private atom if
available, else we request XA_STRING data and format according to the
document's global defaults.
This system works fine in DCS-to-DCS transfers, or transfers between
the DCS and a system that can only handle raw text anyways (e.g. a vi
window). However, in transfers between our DCS and some other application
that also deals with fancy text (e.g. FrameMaker or Interleaf), we are
losing formatting information unnecessarily. Clearly, no single format
could allow perfect transfers between products such as these, because
the information each product stores internally is disjoint. However, there
does seem to be certain concepts that most products of this type support;
for example, character-by-character specification of text attributes.
My question, then, is whether there are any standards emerging in this
area. Are any X-based text-related products beginning to support data
transfers richer than XA_STRING but more generic than their private formats?
Might it be appropriate to adopt the Macintosh or MS/Windows standards
or create a new one for X? Is anyone attempting to use SGML (a proposed
document description format) as part of the solution to this problem?
If you have observations and comments, I would appreciate e-mail since
News articles expire quickly at our site. Many thanks!
Dan Miller - Applix Inc.
miller@applix.com
(508) 870-0300 x362
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