zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Jaap Karssenberg <jaap.karssenberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 5:58 AM, Paul Evans <gemlog@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Monday, August 18, 2014 20:24:17 hansbkk@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > I imagine Jaap's using a pre-existing gtk or python lib to do the
> > render-clipboard-table-as-bitmap, but if he coded it from scratch I
> > wouldn't be too flabbergasted, such a fine piece of work is Zim. . .
> I really was just at the point of sending that email when yours came in
> and I did not know about that feature at all, even though I've been using
> zim for years now. Thank you very much for posting. I always mean to play
> with zim, but never have the time these days -- I just use it to death :-)
> Now I'm curious just how that feature is implemented.
> paul
>

Nothing fancy actually. Copy-paste in general is a negotiation between two
programs. Zim simply tells the other program that it is able to handle text
and images, the program you pasting from then replies with what it can do.
In this case Libre-calc and Excel themselves are able to render pictures
and support pasting as picture. So zim just gets image content directly.

As for rendering tables. Yes, there is a long standing feature request. The
new "embedded objects" code in the latest release will allow to built a
simple version  quite easily - e.g. just rows and columns - but full
support with table spans etc. is still some more work.

Regards,

Jaap