Hi John,

Yes, you may want to open a ticket with support ... but on looking briefly into this I'm thinking there is not much that we can do about this behavior. It appears to me to be something we have little control over in XPP itself.

The complication is that in your scenario you are dealing with a mix of environments (Linux and Windows) and because of that, as Bart said, you have Exceed (or an X/Server) in the mix as well.

XPP is running on Linux and this is basically an X11 application (now GTK-based instead of Motif-based), so it's using GTK calls to Copy/Paste to/from the "clipboard" and I'm assuming that the GTK calls are mapping to X11 calls. On Windows it's true that the XPP XyView and Sdedit programs are also GTK-based, but there's no X11 involved and no X/Server - I'm assuming that GTK must be mapping things to native Windows calls.

I'm also assuming (as did Bart) that the "external apps" you are talking about are native Windows programs like Word, which are using the Microsoft clipboard (and most likely this would also be true for the XyView and Sdedit programs when they are running on Windows).

And somewhere (outside of XPP itself), code and/or programs are interacting between the X11 and Microsoft implementations of their "clipboard". It's all very complicated.

For example, when I'm using a Remote Desktop (or Terminal Services) session I have observed that there is an "RDP Clipboard Monitor" (rdpclip.exe) process that's involved in Copy/Paste operations between that remote session and my laptop. I've found at times that things get "wedged" and I've had to kill and restart that rdpclip.exe process in my RD session. This is not X11 releated; just mentioning that to show that there's a lot of moving pieces involved.

As far as I can tell, in XPP we are doing the Copy/Paste operations using appropriate GTK "clipboard" calls and are not doing anything incorrectly.

The GTK documentation refers to the FreeDesktop Clipboard Specification.

One thing it mentions in that spec:

A remaining somewhat odd thing about X selections is that exiting the app you did a cut/copy from removes the cut/copied data from the clipboard, since the selection protocol is asynchronous and requires the source app to provide the data at paste time. The solution here would be a standardized protocol for a "clipboard daemon" so that apps could hand off their data to a daemon when they exit. Or alternatively, you can run an application such as xclipboard which constantly "harvests" clipboard selections.

I would conclude that your experience validates this behavior, since as you say when you exit the XPP division it appears to clear the XPP (or GTK/X11) clipboard. I've also observed the same behavior.

I've never tried it myself, but I wonder if the suggestion in that spec to run an application such as xclipboard would make things work better? It may not help.

Hi John,

Yes, you may want to open a ticket with support ... but on looking briefly into this I'm thinking there is not much that we can do about this behavior. It appears to me to be something we have little control over in XPP itself.

The complication is that in your scenario you are dealing with a mix of environments (Linux and Windows) and because of that, as Bart said, you have Exceed (or an X/Server) in the mix as well.

XPP is running on Linux and this is basically an X11 application (now GTK-based instead of Motif-based), so it's using GTK calls to Copy/Paste to/from the "clipboard" and I'm assuming that the GTK calls are mapping to X11 calls. On Windows it's true that the XPP XyView and Sdedit programs are also GTK-based, but there's no X11 involved and no X/Server - I'm assuming that GTK must be mapping things to native Windows calls.

I'm also assuming (as did Bart) that the "external apps" you are talking about are native Windows programs like Word, which are using the Microsoft clipboard (and most likely this would also be true for the XyView and Sdedit programs when they are running on Windows).

And somewhere (outside of XPP itself), code and/or programs are interacting between the X11 and Microsoft implementations of their "clipboard". It's all very complicated.

For example, when I'm using a Remote Desktop (or Terminal Services) session I have observed that there is an "RDP Clipboard Monitor" (rdpclip.exe) process that's involved in Copy/Paste operations between that remote session and my laptop. I've found at times that things get "wedged" and I've had to kill and restart that rdpclip.exe process in my RD session. This is not X11 releated; just mentioning that to show that there's a lot of moving pieces involved.

As far as I can tell, in XPP we are doing the Copy/Paste operations using appropriate GTK "clipboard" calls and are not doing anything incorrectly.

The GTK documentation refers to the FreeDesktop Clipboard Specification.

One thing it mentions in that spec:

A remaining somewhat odd thing about X selections is that exiting the app you did a cut/copy from removes the cut/copied data from the clipboard, since the selection protocol is asynchronous and requires the source app to provide the data at paste time. The solution here would be a standardized protocol for a "clipboard daemon" so that apps could hand off their data to a daemon when they exit. Or alternatively, you can run an application such as xclipboard which constantly "harvests" clipboard selections.

I would conclude that your experience validates this behavior, since as you say when you exit the XPP division it appears to clear the XPP (or GTK/X11) clipboard. I've also observed the same behavior.

I've never tried it myself, but I wonder if the suggestion in that spec to run an application such as xclipboard would make things work better? It may not help.

So quick question, did the switch to GTK from MOTIF happen when XPP went from 9.3 to 9.4?  The users indicate it did work in the past.  The users did complain @ our 9.4 upgrade, but we had this on the back burner working other items.