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Clipboard weirdness explained
Authored by: andrewz on Oct 21, '02 02:43:15PM
There seems to be some confusion about the existence of more than one general clipboard. There is in fact one general pasteboard (Cocoa term for clipboard), and it can contain more than one representation of the copied information. When you copy something, a program can put several representations of data onto the pasteboard, such as plain text, rich text, etc. When you paste something, a program takes the richest possible representation of the data from the pasteboard. If there aren't any forms that it understands, nothing happens.

Each data representation on the pasteboard is identified by a description. When you copy a message in Mail, it puts two representations onto the general pasteboard, with these descriptions:

  • RFC822MessageDatasPboardType
  • NeXT RTFD pasteboard type
The first one is only used by Mail. The latter is used by any Cocoa application that accepts rich text, such as TextEdit, Stickies, or Mail itself. When you paste into one of these apps and then copy again, the pasteboard then contains:
  • NeXT Rich Text Format v1.0 pasteboard type
  • NSStringPboardType
  • NeXT plain ascii pasteboard type
  • etc.
Now you can paste into most programs that accept plain or rich text. It would more useful if Mail also put a plain text version of the message on the clipboard when you copy a message!

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