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Cutting/Pasting Between G2 and Other Applications

You can cut and paste text, including international characters, between G2 and most other applications that include an edit menu with Cut, Copy, and Paste options.


Note: Telewindows supports all of the G2 cut and paste functionality, but for simplicity, this section refers only to G2.

You can exchange text between two G2 processes, and all text, including international characters, can be copied between G2 processes. On Windows NT systems, you can copy international text to other applications that support the Unicode character set. On X Windows systems, you can copy international text to other applications that support Compound Text.

To cut or copy text from G2 to another application:

  1. From the editor, select the text to cut or copy and choose the Cut or Copy menu selections.

  2. With the destination application in focus, position the cursor and choose that application's Paste option.

To copy text from an external application to G2:

  1. From the source application, select the text to copy and choose Cut or Copy from the application Edit menu.

  2. With G2 in focus, click Paste in the editor. The new text appears in the editor.

Using the Clipboard for Text Exchange

G2 uses the clipboard to exchange text in both an X Windows and a Windows NT environment.

Exchanging text through the clipboard involves a:

Text Source

When placing text upon the clipboard, the source application has no knowledge of the destination application, and cannot know which text formats it supports. To accommodate various possibilities, the source application may copy text to the clipboard in multiple formats, depending on the platform:

Source Application Windows NT X Windows
G2/Telewindows
CF_TEXT
ISO Latin-1

CF_UNICODETEXT
Compound Text
Non-G2/Telewindows
CF_TEXT
ISO Latin-1

CF_UNICODETEXT
Compound Text


Note: The CF_TEXT format is basically the same as ISO Latin-1. Not all applications support the CF_UNICODETEXT or Compound Text formats.

A major difference between the text formats is their support of international characters:

Text Format Supports
CF_TEXT
All keyboard characters and some European characters such as those for French, German, and so on.
ISO Latin-1
All keyboard characters and some European characters such as those for French, German, and so on.
CF_UNICODETEXT
All Unicode-supported international characters.
Compound Text
Most international characters.

When pasting clipboard text from G2 to a destination application, international character support in text is dependent on:

Displaying Unicode Characters

Internally, G2 uses and fully supports the entire Unicode character set. Such support, however, does not guarantee universal character display. You can enter any Unicode character in the editor, or import any character into a KB, but G2 may be unable to display the character. G2 represents any character that it cannot display as a solid block (n).

Displaying characters in a KB, both within the editor as a character entry facility, and in other contexts such as messages and name boxes, is largely dependent upon the languages that G2 supports and the available fonts.

In addition to English and European languages, G2 supports:


Note: To display Japanese and Korean characters in outline fonts requires appropriate authorization.

By default, the fonts G2 uses to display characters reside in a fonts subdirectory of the G2 product directory. You can use an alternative location for the font files, but then must specify that location as described in Using G2 Fonts.

If the correct fonts are not installed on either G2 or another application, solid blocks (n) appear in place of the international characters.

When pasting text, these are the results you can expect, depending on what the destination application supports:

If application... Windows NT X Windows
Supports Unicode and has proper fonts installed
Displays all text and international characters that G2 copied to the clipboard.

Does not support Unicode
Displays only supported characters.

Supports Compound Text and has appropriate fonts installed

Displays most of the text and international characters that G2 copied to the clipboard.
Does not support Compound Text

Displays only supported characters.

No characters are lost when cutting or pasting between two G2 processes.

G2's intelligent cut and paste, where cutting a word and pasting it into existing text adds appropriate space characters, works as it normally does, as long as the text source and destination are the same G2. There is no intelligent cut and paste from another application into G2, or between two G2 processes.

On Windows NT platforms, text is null-terminated, as required by the Windows clipboard standard. On X Windows, text can contain embedded nulls.

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