On Jan 26, 12:45 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Doug McNutt) wrote:
> At 03:15 +0000 1/21/08, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> >Is there a module that will let one manipulate a Mac OS X pasteboard? There
> >does not seem to be anything on CPAN that strikes me as being for that
> >purpose.
>
> Have a look at the tools pbcopy and pbpaste that are delivered with OS neXt.
I don't have NeXt (however it's capitalized), but tools with the same
names ship with Mac OS X. The OS X version is limited to one flavor of
data ('com.apple.traditional-mac-plain-text') and four pasteboards --
the system clipboard, the "find" pasteboard, the "ruler" pasteboard,
and the "font" pasteboard. The manual is at
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pbcopy.1.html
I did not intend to be so limited, though the only non-text test I
have done is to copy a JPEG to the system clipboard with Graphic
Converter, send it back to a file with my software (it turned out to
be a PICT on the clipboard), open the file, and look to see that I got
the same picture back.
> There is a subtle difference between pasteboard and clipboard. NeXt has a
> pasteboard which sometimes refers to the current selection and not just to
> something that has been "copied". That allows services to do things like
> "execute selected text as a terminal command".
That's my understanding of the Mac OS X pasteboard. I do not intend to
support promised data in the first release, and I may never fully
support writing services (which appear to require a full-blown Mac OS
X application bundle with embedded Info.plist file) in Perl. Right now
the development plan (well, aspiration anyway) is:
1) Basic functionality
2) Promised data
3) Destination URLs
4) Hooks for translation services
Number 4 is intended to mean "If you can get the Perl code into a Mac
OS X application bundle (and I think X Code allows this, though I have
never done anything with it), I will try to supply the code to acquire
the data." I think I understand number 2, but the others are really
fuzzy to me now, and may never happen.
Tom Wyant
