Wish no 951

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dorayme - 24 Mar 2007 20:40 GMT

That all text, no matter where it is on a Mac, be copy/pasteable.

I am _not_ meaning to include explicit pictures of text as on
some websites (that would be an even more extremely fanciful
wish, ocr built in algorithms. If it was to be included in the
wish I would use an imaginary number to label the wish)

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dorayme

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Gerry - 24 Mar 2007 21:52 GMT

In article
<doraymeRidThis-290EB2.05401225032007@news-vip.optusnet.com.au>,

> That all text, no matter where it is on a Mac, be copy/pasteable.

I'm sorry but I don't know what you want. An example would be nice,
where the text was not able to be copied.

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Mike Rosenberg - 24 Mar 2007 22:12 GMT

> I'm sorry but I don't know what you want. An example would be nice,
> where the text was not able to be copied.

I'm not the OP, but there have been times when I wished I could copy the
text from a dialog box rather than take a screen shot.

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dorayme - 25 Mar 2007 01:41 GMT

In article
<1hvhp2y.11q0o7sbaa112N%mikePOST@TOGROUPmacconsult.com>,

> > I'm sorry but I don't know what you want. An example would be nice,
> > where the text was not able to be copied.
>
> I'm not the OP, but there have been times when I wished I could copy the
> text from a dialog box rather than take a screen shot.

Mike, go to the top of the class!

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dorayme

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Gregory Weston - 25 Mar 2007 12:18 GMT

In article
<doraymeRidThis-290EB2.05401225032007@news-vip.optusnet.com.au>,

> That all text, no matter where it is on a Mac, be copy/pasteable.
>
> I am _not_ meaning to include explicit pictures of text as on
> some websites (that would be an even more extremely fanciful
> wish, ocr built in algorithms. If it was to be included in the
> wish I would use an imaginary number to label the wish)

I understand the desire, and share it to some extent, but there'd have
to be a huge infrastructure change to support that _and_ continue to
allow developers the control and flexibility they have today in how
their text content is presented.

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dorayme - 25 Mar 2007 21:41 GMT

> In article
> <doraymeRidThis-290EB2.05401225032007@news-vip.optusnet.com.au>,
[quoted text clipped - 10 lines]
> allow developers the control and flexibility they have today in how
> their text content is presented.

Well, I don't know about what would be needed to make more text
available for copy/pasteability. Don't quiz me but I have a rough
impression that more is available in OSX than ever was on pre X.
I cannot recall instances but was pleasantly surprised to notice
the ability for some notices that came up, info panels and odds
and ends.

In pre X days there were massive numbers of notices tucked away
in resources, made available to developers, (able to be looked at
etc by such as ResEdit). Presumably there is a similar pool of
stuff for X too. Would it be such a big thing to work it so that
all the text in these notices are copy/pasteable when they appear
on the screen in normal operations? I have no idea. Perhaps you
are right.

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dorayme

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Gregory Weston - 25 Mar 2007 22:59 GMT

In article
<doraymeRidThis-02B718.06410526032007@news-vip.optusnet.com.au>,

> > In article
> > <doraymeRidThis-290EB2.05401225032007@news-vip.optusnet.com.au>,
[quoted text clipped - 14 lines]
> available for copy/pasteability. Don't quiz me but I have a rough
> impression that more is available in OSX than ever was on pre X.

As long as the developer's not doing anything "interesting" and is using
Cocoa, it's pretty much up to developer choice to decide whether any
given bit of text in a text-displaying control is selectable or not.
That could probably be extended to controls that aren't primarily about
text display with little impact.

> Would it be such a big thing to work it so that
> all the text in these notices are copy/pasteable when they appear
> on the screen in normal operations? I have no idea. Perhaps you
> are right.

Ah, but you said: "That all text, no matter where it is on a Mac, be
copy/pasteable."

The problems start to arise as soon as you leave those trivial
text-display facilities behind. You can't really do anything about
developers who decide to draw shapes that happen to be glyphs to the
screen using still-supported legacy routines. Going through the real
text layout facilities that support arbitrary layout is enough of an
effort that it would probably turn off a lot of people if that was they
way they _had_ to do it.

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Clever Monkey - 26 Mar 2007 18:00 GMT

Often arbitrary text /is/ can be selected, but the app does not
highlight the selected text. I've noticed that if I select some text in
arbitrary places and issue cmd-c, the Edit menu will flash briefly. The
text will be in the clipboard buffer.

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dorayme - 26 Mar 2007 22:53 GMT

> > That all text, no matter where it is on a Mac, be copy/pasteable.
> >
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
> arbitrary places and issue cmd-c, the Edit menu will flash briefly. The
> text will be in the clipboard buffer.

Good point! I never thought of that. I know this works for
clippings.

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dorayme

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David C. - 27 Mar 2007 19:03 GMT

> That all text, no matter where it is on a Mac, be copy/pasteable.

For Quartz controls that are designed for text, this should be doable,
although I could imagine some developers wanting to disable this under
some circumstances.

For custom text-like controls, the developer might need to add some
explicit support, but that may not be too big a deal, if a granularity
of "copy the entire widget's content" is acceptable.

It becomes ugly when text is simply drawn on a window without any kind
of widget. It would require a lot of overhead for the system to track
these drawing strokes, to allow the text to be selected and cut. And
the system probably couldn't track this at all if the text is rendered
to a bitmap, where it may be transformed and processed prior to display.

-- David

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dorayme - 27 Mar 2007 23:19 GMT

> > That all text, no matter where it is on a Mac, be copy/pasteable.
>
[quoted text clipped - 13 lines]
>
> -- David

OK, what about this: all notices on Macs be identified by an
explicit number. E.g. ID 5014 And all Mac users have easy access
to a database of these notices in copy/pasteable text format. The
copy/pasteable text being accessible from a context menu.
tremendously useful for communications on NGs and help desks.

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dorayme

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Gregory Weston - 28 Mar 2007 01:28 GMT

In article
<doraymeRidThis-20496B.08193628032007@news-vip.optusnet.com.au>,

> > > That all text, no matter where it is on a Mac, be copy/pasteable.
> >
[quoted text clipped - 19 lines]
> copy/pasteable text being accessible from a context menu.
> tremendously useful for communications on NGs and help desks.

Wouldn't the number itself be sufficient in that case?

I'm not entirely sure what's meant be "all notices" to be honest. Is
this just about being able to get at the text of messages that come from
the OS itself (albeit sometimes through an application) such as error
codes?

If so, it'd take cooperation by developers to get them to also present
the error code number instead of completely suppressing it in favor of
the human-meaningful message.

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dorayme - 28 Mar 2007 01:53 GMT

> > OK, what about this: all notices on Macs be identified by an
> > explicit number. E.g. ID 5014 And all Mac users have easy access
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
>
> Wouldn't the number itself be sufficient in that case?

What would a number mean to an average Mac user?

> I'm not entirely sure what's meant be "all notices" to be honest. Is
> this just about being able to get at the text of messages that come from
> the OS itself (albeit sometimes through an application) such as error
> codes?

This is the sort of thing, yes.

> If so, it'd take cooperation by developers to get them to also present
> the error code number instead of completely suppressing it in favor of
> the human-meaningful message.

I assume I was not understood to be favouring a number instead of
a friendly message. Yes indeed, it would take cooperation. I do
not live in hope.

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dorayme

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Gregory Weston - 28 Mar 2007 11:53 GMT

In article
<doraymeRidThis-D42960.10533628032007@news-vip.optusnet.com.au>,

> > > OK, what about this: all notices on Macs be identified by an
> > > explicit number. E.g. ID 5014 And all Mac users have easy access
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
> >
> What would a number mean to an average Mac user?

It wouldn't. But if you're going to be submitting information to a help
desk (or even a public forum where everyone else has the same list of
numbers mapped to strings) just passing along the number would be enough
because the people prepared to help you would be able to look up the
message just as well as you did.

G

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Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / March 2007

Wish no 951