I’ve been having some real copy-and-paste problems, and I don’t know quite where to begin. The biggest problem is copying and pasting into LibreOffice Calc, but there are also copy-and-paste issues into gedit, and occasional problems with Firefox or Chromium.
It’s not constant - somewhat intermittent but frequent.
I open a pdf file (one that you can copy-and-paste from). I then try to copy and paste information from the pdf into either LibreOffice Calc or gedit. Sometimes it works fine. Sometimes when I try to paste, I get the previous copied item (this has been reported but in a different context, and seemed to be LibreOffice only in other people’s description). That has held true for both LibreOffice AND gedit! I also have had occasional problems copying back and forth to Firefox or Chromium.
Sometimes it will copy fine and paste - but when I try to paste the information into multiple cells, it only pastes into the first one. (That’s a minor irritation.)
It’s not limited to using the mouse for copying, control-C (which I use a lot) also will do it. Doing Control-C twice sometimes seems to trigger the problem in the previous sentence, other times it works fine. I’ve done some reading and have found nothing that works. This ‘feels’ (experienced observation) to be more than LibreOffice, unlike the other reports I read.
I’m using Leap 15.2, LibreOffice 7.1.3.2. I have problems from PDF files to Calc, gedit, Firefox, Chromium. I have problems going between the different programs, although it’s far less of an issue with Firefox and Chromium than with gedit or Calc. It’s also showed when using Writer.
I’m getting tired of having to copy twice to get the right info pasted. I do a LOT of cut-and-paste in my work (gathering metadata from formal reports), and it’s slowing me down.
This is probably in a desktop, but I failed to find which DE you use.
Personally I use KDE Plasma and I copy/paste in the X-Windows way: using mouse left button to select a piece of text, when needed left button click on the place where to paste and then middle button click to paste. But I have seen other people using weird typing on the keyboard. So it seems that there are several ways to copy/paste. Better always explain exactly what you do instead of hoping that others have the same working habits as you.
Also with KDE, after selecting with (left mouse button) that text is then in the KDE Clipboard. When copy/paste doesn’t function as you expect, is the text then in the clpiboard or not?
I use the keystrokes for copy-and-paste (control-c, control-v) a lot - for me it’s a LOT faster than the mouse. They’re also old-school, used in word processors before the mouse was invented. There is a bunch of them, carried over from Word Perfect.
Linux - disabling primary selection and using only clipboard selection
There are 2 clipboard-like mechanisms in Linux - primary selection (copy by selecting text and paste by middle mouse button) and clipboard selection (copy by CTRL+C, paste by CTRL+V).
I presume some users want to disable primary selection. I use the primary selection and never use CTRL+C, CTRL+V and others.
You are of course free to use any existing way of doing things the way you like it. And there is no need to explain why it is your preferred way of doing it. And you are also free to ask questions when this way of working gives you problems. But assuming that the way you do it is thus the way anybody will do it that thus posting a question without further explanation about what you do requires asking from this side. With all the loss of time end effort involved.
Same with using Gnome. That is very fine, but when you do not explain, how can others know?
[HR][/HR]I admit to also being caught out by this Clipboard behaviour – with KDE Plasma – occasionally I have to click to the Clipboard Plasmoid (Klipper) to select the item to be pasted …
BTW, the KDE Klipper handbook mentions this –
The X Window System® uses two separate clipboard buffers: the “selection” and the “clipboard”. Text is placed in the selection buffer by simply selecting it, and can be pasted with the middle mouse button. To place text in the clipboard buffer, select it and press Ctrl+X or Ctrl+C. Text from the clipboard buffer is pasted using Ctrl+V or by selecting Paste in a context menu.
i also get the problem when i use my linux desktop, https://it.wenda123.org/static/pix.jpgmy method is to log out and then re login, the strange copy paste problem will go away,](https://it.wenda123.org/) i think ,this problem has something to desk with the gui manager app, my gui enviroment is kde…
I don’t understand why you’re replying like this. I never assumed that the way I do things is the way everyone does it - but throughout my life, I’ve had people insist that I do things the way THEY think they should be done (and I’m past tired of that). I’ve never used the middle button for copy-and-paste (didn’t even know that it would work). WWFY is my mindset. I use keystrokes. Other people do things different. IMO, neither method is superior, but both should work.
I also don’t understand what you mean about Gnome. I was asked, I answered with that information.
I do see that others have pointed to sources that might help. I appreciate that - I’ve already spent a couple of hours searching on how to fix that problem, and the answers I’d found, were all about the same issue with LibreOffice, but didn’t include the other software I use all the time.
I suspect that what’s going on here is, an unwanted interaction between the “selection buffer” and the “clipboard buffer” –
You point out that, you only ever use keystrokes.
The question is, what happens when you select text by <Shift-Ctrl-LeftArrow (or RightArrow or UpArrow or Down Arrow)>?
*=2]I suspect that, the selected text will be placed in the “selection buffer” but, need to test this with a “try and see” method …
*=2]I do notice that, KDE Plasma also places test selected by keystrokes in it’s Clipboard – which may well service both buffers …
*=2]But, that’s something I’ll investigate next week – Tuesday at the earliest …
[HR][/HR]BTW, please try to not be upset by Henk’s style – he’s even older than me and probably feeling his age even more than me – and I’m old enough to remember repairing DEC PDP-11 machines in the late 1970s – Tool-Case, Oscilloscope, Micro-Fiche, hardware schematic drawings …
I was only talking about your very first post in this thread where you neither informed us that you were using Gnome, nor how you copy/paste. Thus my conclusion that you implicitly must have assumed that people you ask for help do these things the same you you do them.
I greatly appreciate that! I’ve learned a lot through this headache… if my time and resources weren’t so limited, I’d be doing more to try to figure it out!
In order to change clipboard/selection behavior, select Configure Klipper… from the Klipper context menu, and in the dialog box that appears, select the General page. Unchecking Synchronize contents of the clipboard and the selection makes the clipboard and selection function as completely separate buffers as described above. With this option set, the option Ignore selection will prevent Klipper from including the contents of the selection in its clipboard history and from performing actions on the contents of the selection.** Selecting Synchronize contents of the clipboard and the selection causes the clipboard and selection buffers to always be the same, meaning that text in the selection can be pasted with either the middle mouse button or the key combination Strg+V, and similarly for text in the clipboard buffer.**
Note also PDFs can be created as pictures not text and those will not copy. You must have real text not bitmap images to be able to copy. Also they may have various security set.
Hi Bob
PDF’s can be open directly with LibreOffice Draw?
Use pdftotext to convert the pdf to txt?
pdftotext -layout somefile.pdf
Above command will convert the file to somefile.txt in the current directory and preserve the layout if it’s a spreadsheet. You should then be able to import to LibreOffice Calc.
I’ve not encountered a formal report in my work that was done as images, but old journal articles - that used to be common. I have good Optical Character Recognition software (multi-language) which works when I need to get text out of an image-based PDF.
All of the reports (so far) are such that I can open them with the linux doc reader, then paste them into a spreadsheet - or into gedit, or into Firefox or Chromium. They’re actually public documents, but ones people rarely see because they don’t know they’re available. My job is to get specific metadata from the reports - hence the copy-and-pasting from multiple sources/programs into multiple programs.
(Laugh!) I’ve learned a whole lot about what IS being done to help the environment since I got this job.