DT2.0pb4 and NeoOffice - link issue

[kithairon]

Struggling with DT’s links to external text apps: after DT2.0pb2 (and probably pb3) have produced working links in NeoOffice 2.2.5 I find that with DT2.0pb4 and NeoOffice 3.0 the functionality gets lost – clipping an external link from a specific record in DT2 to NeoOffice with DT’s “Edit>copy link item” only produces a raw link in NeoOffice.

Have written in NeoOffice’s forum about this and got the following reply by one of the developers:

Then there is the problem: unformatted text is the only data flavor in NeoOffice’s supported data flavors that matches the data flavors DevonThink is pushing to the clipboard.

In other words, this is not a NeoOffice bug as supports the traditional, core Mac data flavors like raw URLs, RTF, and HTML. The problem is that DevonThink does not push any of these traditional, core Mac data flavors to the clipboard so NeoOffice has to settle for the unformatted text flavor.

I suspect that pasting DevonThink data worked at some point maybe because an older version of their code supported a different set of Mac data flavors that they have since dropped from their code?

I am confident that with a previous Beta of DT and NeoOffice 2.5.5 this was perfectly possible. What has changed? Can anything be done about this?
Thanks,

kithairon

Exact same issue with Mellel; see the old thread here:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7670

[cgrunenberg]

@kithairon

What has changed?

Nothing over here. But the NeoOffice team might have a look at WebURLsWithTitlesPboardType or CorePasteboardFlavorType ‘urln’.

[kithairon]

Here a reply from one of the NeoOffice developers that may help explain – or even resolve this?

Unfortunately, I have bad news: this issue is likely not resolveable unless DevonThink adds the Rich Text Format (RTF) to the list of data flavors that they copy to the system clipboard. This is not DevonThink’s fault but, instead, is a limitation of NeoOffice’s underlying OpenOffice.org code.

I took a close look at NeoOffice’s underlying OpenOfffice.org code and found that their code will neither copy or paste URLs. This limitation exists in both NeoOffice 2.2.5 and NeoOffice 3.0. Because of this OpenOffice.org limitation, there are only two ways to get a pasted URL to be recognized (note that this only works in Writer documents):

1. Paste the URL as unformatted text and then press the spacebar or the Return key. At that point, if the URL starts with “file://”, “http://”, or “https://”, NeoOffice’s underlying OpenOffice.org code will then format the pasted text as a URL link.

2. Select the Edit :: Paste Special menu in NeoOffice and select Rich Text Format (RTF). Of course, this does not work with DevonThink as they don’t support the RTF data flavor for URLs. But if they ever do, this option would work.

As it stands the two most versatile Text apps on OSX (NeoOffice and Mellel) don’t seem to handle DT’s external links.
Could this rtf-flavour for URLs be added in DT?

I’m not techsavy enough to help or to even understand who should/could do the necessary moves to make this possible – but it would be great if it somehow happened!
Thanks.

kithairon

[cgrunenberg]

At least Mellel’s developers should be able to support those pasteboard types within a few minutes. Because copying rich text to the pasteboard has the disadvantage that the formatting provided by DEVONthink is used whereas applications like TextEdit use the provided URL, name & current style. Maybe there are additional side effects.

[kithairon]

Thanks, Christian, for the clarifications. I left your remark (about the Mellel developers) as an incentive over at the Mellel forum as an update to my neglected post on the same topic.

kithairon

[kithairon]

The Mellel folks have explained to me that Mellel currently doesn’t support external links, i.e. that even if they imported the WebURLsWithTitlesPboardType or CorePasteboardFlavorType ‘urln’ from DT’s link, there is nowhere that they could translate it into.

Similar limitations with NeoOffice, the underlying OpenOffice code doesn’t seem to handle the above information; the rtf flavours that NeoOffice could handle, seem an unlikely development from DT’s side, as explained by Christian. Thus for both apps no direct and elegant implementation of DT’s external links.

The good news is DanZac’s workaround: Copy raw links from DT to either of the above text apps, triple click the resulting text-string and use the service menu’s “Open URL” command – which takes us neatly back to the Devon record the raw link points to. With a keyboard shortcout to the “Open URL” (assign according to your like via the System Prefs) the whole procedure wins a little more grace. Thanks for bearing with me on this, thanks to DanZac.

kithairon

[arathe]

Thanks, kithairon!

This is a very good workaround. I’ve tried on Mellel and NeoOffice–and yes, indeed: it works very well. (Interestingly, OpenOffice–NeoOffice’s cousin–doesn’t handle the Services Menu very robustly–and the “Open URL” service does not work. Sigh.)

Thanks again. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. =)

[mja]

Thanks for this workaround.
Fortunately it’s working in Pages, too.

Regards