Rich Text Clipboard

dshafik

Hi,

I am currently trying to replicate some of my Mac workflow to iOS, and the biggest hurdle I've run into is code highliting for keynote presentations.

I tried copy and pasting from Safari (and chrome, Firefox , and opera) but it would simply paste as plain text into keynote — I was able to paste as rich text into a couple of other apps but none that would let me then get it into keynote as RTF.

On Mac I use pygments to output RTF and pipe it into pbcopy and now have pygments up and running inside Pythonista successfully. However, I can't get it into the clipboard as RTF.

It looks like in 1.6 I could use the native Obj-C clipboard stuff, but this release isn't out yet — any suggestions for how I might accomplish this in 1.5?

omz

I'm sorry, but there's no way to do this in 1.5.

dshafik

@omz will 2.0 be a free upgrade (whenever apple approves it)? I just bought 1.5 today…

Webmaster4o

@dshafik That is the plan, yes. I'm not sure if there will be a cost increase for new users buying the app, but the upgrade should be free for existing users

dshafik

So, 2.0 is now out, and I've continued working on this. I've tried multiple approaches and none of them work:

from objc_util import * 
from pygments import highlight
from pygments.lexers import PhpLexer
from pygments.formatters import RtfFormatter

code = '<?php echo "hello world"; ?>'
rtf = highlight(code, PhpLexer(), RtfFormatter())

fp = open('highlight.rtf', 'w+')
fp.write(rtf)
data = NSData.dataWithContentsOfFile_('highlight.rtf')

c = ObjCClass('UIPasteboard')
pasteBoard = c.generalPasteboard()

pasteBoard.setValue_forPasteboardType_(data, 'public.rtf')

This one results in:

> pasteBoard.pasteboardTypes()
<__NSCFArray: (
    "public.rtf"
)>

But I can't seem to paste it into say, Keynote (or a Word, etc.). Maybe this is an issue with Keynote , I guess.

Maybe I could generate an image to insert? Thoughts?

Webmaster4o

Generating an image shouldn't be hard. Try rendering with PIL ImageDraw.

JonB

You forgot to close your file pointer.

with open(...) as fp:    
   fp.write(.....)

worked for me.
The giveaway: data was NSZeroData
Also, it was not needed here, but I find it useful to use os.path.abspath, and/ or nsurl(filepath) when sending file names to objc.

dshafik

@JonB I've not seen that syntax before, I assume creates a block (or some sort of scoped section) in which fp is made available and then when the block is left it is automatically closed?

Anyhow, I do now see data in data but I still can't get it to paste in. Were you able to do that?

JonB

The "with" syntax creates a context, which automatically does some clean up when the block ends. For file handles, this means it calls .close() (even if there is an exception, etc), so many people advocate for this style of file handling. You could have also just called fp.close().

I have not tried pasting anything. It is not clear to me that public.rtf is supported in UIpasteboard. Does pygments support an html formatter? You might try public.html.

omz

I've experimented a little bit with this, and it seems to be harder than I thought. The iWork apps apparently copy rich text in some internal format that I can't figure out (com.apple.iWork.TSPNativeData), and neither RTF nor HTML appear to be supported.

Copying formatted text from Safari or Notes, and pasting it into Pages/Keynote doesn't work either (the formatting is discarded).

omz

If an image is acceptable for you, this might work:

from objc_util import * 
from pygments import highlight
from pygments.lexers import PhpLexer
from pygments.formatters import RtfFormatter
import ui
import clipboard
NSAttributedString = ObjCClass('NSAttributedString')

code = '<?php echo "hello world"; ?>'
rtf = highlight(code, PhpLexer(), RtfFormatter())

rtf_data = ns(bytearray(rtf))
attr_str = NSAttributedString.alloc().initWithData_options_documentAttributes_error_(rtf_data, None, None, None).autorelease()
size = attr_str.size()
with ui.ImageContext(size.width, size.height) as ctx:
	attr_str.drawAtPoint_(CGPoint(0.0, 0.0))
	img = ctx.get_image()
	clipboard.set_image(img)

I'm using an NSAttributedString that is initialized from RTF data. Unfortunately, pygment's own method for rendering into images (GifImageFormatter etc.) don't work correctly in Pythonista because the method that it uses for finding system fonts fails on iOS.

dshafik

I managed to get Pygments image drawing working by monkey patching the font stuff (ick!):

import clipboard
import os
import _font_cache
from objc_util import * 
from pygments import highlight
from pygments.lexers import PhpLexer
from pygments.formatters import ImageFormatter
from pygments.formatters.img import FontManager
from pygments.styles import monokai

monokai.MonokaiStyle.background_color = '#000000'

def _get_nix_font_path(self, name, style):
	if style == 'bold' or style == 'italic':
		return _font_cache.get_font_path('%s %s' % (name, style.capitalize()))	
	elif style == '':
		return _font_cache.get_font_path(name)
	else:
		return
		
FontManager._get_nix_font_path = _get_nix_font_path

''' Replace Unicode newline chars with regular ones '''
code = clipboard.get().replace(unichr(8232), os.linesep)

png = highlight(code, PhpLexer(startinline=True), ImageFormatter(style='monokai', font_name='Source Code Pro', font_size=60, line_numbers=False, line_pad=4))

with open('highlight.png', 'w+') as fp:
	fp.write(png)
	
data = NSData.dataWithContentsOfFile_('highlight.png')

c = ObjCClass('UIPasteboard')
pasteBoard = c.generalPasteboard()
pasteBoard.setData_forPasteboardType_(data, 'public.png')
os.remove('highlight.png')

Resulting in an image like so:

Highlighted Source

jeromecarney

I've logged extensive hours working on a similar objective for the past two week -- outputting formatted text to the clipboard for a custom dictionary wrapper I've built for StarDict data -- but so far I've had no success.

I've been able to coerce raw html into an rtf file, which I can then pass both to an NSData object as well as an attributed string, but there's still no way I can find -- UIPasteboard with every conceivable UTI, javascript, etc., to then send the formated data along to the clipboard. The current work around is to process the data throught Workflow, but that's slow and inelegant, especially when launched from split view.

Is there anything in the works that would enable this functionality? It would seem to be such a basic feature.

JonB

This works for me, sending data to OneNote:

from objc_util import * 
from pygments import highlight
from pygments.lexers import PhpLexer
from pygments.formatters import RtfFormatter
p=ObjCClass('UIPasteboard').generalPasteboard()
code = b'<?php echo "hello world"; ?>'
rtf = highlight(code, PhpLexer(), RtfFormatter())

rtf_data = ns(bytes(rtf,'ascii'))
p.setData_forPasteboardType_(rtf_data,'public.RTF')

jeromecarney

Jon - thanks, you set me on the right track -- the app I want to paste into (MarginNote) accepts rich text only if it's formatted as an Apple Web Archive type. Here's how I ultimately got it to work for Python 2.7, thanks to this guide on coercing HTML into an archive type:

from objc_util import * 
import os
import base64
theDefinition = '<html><head></head><body>''<font size="5">' + '<b>Hello</b> <i>world!2</i>' + '</font></body></html>'
theData = base64.encodestring(theDefinition)
theData = str(theData)
theArchive = """<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
 <dict>
  <key>WebMainResource</key>
  <dict>
   <key>WebResourceData</key>
   <data>
   """ + theData + """   </data>
   <key>WebResourceFrameName</key>
   <string></string>
   <key>WebResourceMIMEType</key>
   <string>text/html</string>
   <key>WebResourceTextEncodingName</key>
   <string>UTF-8</string>
   <key>WebResourceURL</key>
   <string>about:blank</string>
  </dict>
 </dict>
</plist>"""
thePasteBoard = ObjCClass('UIPasteboard')
thePasteBoard = thePasteBoard.generalPasteboard()
theType = "Apple Web Archive pasteboard type"
thePasteBoard.setValue_forPasteboardType_(theArchive,theType)