Combining RTF in Clipboards

Questions & Suggestions
1

Is there a way to combine two clipboards into the System Clipboard, and retain the RTF in both clipboards?

When I try the Set Clipboard action, and use the tokens for the Clipboards it seems to convert the Web Clip to plain text and then apply “Lucidia Grande” font to it, even though I have set the action to use “styled text” (is that the same as RTF?). The AppleScript RTF clipboard comes through OK.

Here’s the Action:

Set Named Clipboard ‘Temporary’ to Styled Text
%NamedClipboard%Web Clip%
%CurrentClipboard%

My use case:
I’ve got one clipboard that is a copy of the user’s selection on a web page.
I’ve got another CB that is a RTF hyperlink generated in AppleScript.
If I use only one of them the RTF is preserved.

I want to combine them so the user can paste into any RTF document.

2

Here's a link to the post/macro where I am trying to combine clipboards:

3

Hey Michael,

I do that in this macro.

-Chris

1 Like
4

Very nice, Chris. Your macro is a true professional work of art.
Your comments and user settings are very helpful.

I’m testing now, and may have some questions for you. :smile:
Should I post them here, or in the thread where your macro is?

5

Hey Michael,

Probably here. That other thread is pretty cluttered.

-Chris

6

The action you describe should work.

For example, this action:

Combines these two:

and

to this:

So it should work, but you can get cases where the conversion between:

  • RTF
  • NSAttributedStrings
  • whatever other styled formats are involved

don't quite work. Specifically I've found that text color tends to be very poorly interoperable.

7

Here is a solution for combining plain text and rich text on a clipboard using AppleScript: