Hi, as I already discussed with Rene and the one or other on #pygame, an easy to use image support for the pygame.scrap clipboard implementation is needed. Currently it only accepts strings, which - although it allows e.g. buffered surfaces - does not ensure interoperability with other applications like Gimp, image viewers and whatever else. Rene mentioned an enhancement of the pygame.image saving routines, so that they can store surface information directly into character buffers. This'd be great, but leaves several questions for the scrap module open, such as the exact format identification to share the contents between the pygame application and others. I looked over the Qt and Gtk+ clipboard implementations and noted, that they use the mime-type RFC to identify the stored contents. I'd prefer that mechanism as well as it would a) ensure interoperability with two major UI toolkits, and b) allow an unique identification base for whatever is placed into the clipboard for other applications. I am not sure, how native Win32, QNX and Mac OS applications handle that, but I guess that they treat content in a similar manner. However, storing surface data in the one or other format or receiving image information from other applications will also bring several other issues for X11 up, which will make it necessary to implement a minimum subset of the X ICCCM standard[0]. Although this sounds like a big task, this should not be that much work if the interface are kept generic enough If this support will be added and the implementations be made, it would be a nice addition to have support for user-defined content types as well, so that a user can define his own specific conversion formats for sharing his own contents, which can be received by other applications, which offer support for that. [0] The X implementations have a maximum protocol size for transferring data, which makes it necessary to send and receive information in multiple chunks, must guarantee successful transports to or from an application, have to deal with X failures, must support multiple string conversions for different locale encodings and more. Feedback is welcome. Regards Marcus
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