Pasting a colour to the palette from the clipboard data

[William]

Using the Serif DrawPlus X4 program I drew a quickshape, in fact a Quick ZigZag, and coloured it using the Artist’s Colours palette of DrawPlus X4 to the colour Cadmium Yellow Primrose.

If I want that shape and that colour in FontCreator I can achieve that result by copying and pasting the shape and by looking up the RGB colour values in DrawPlus and then using those colour values within the FontCreator colour palette.

If I copy the shape onto the clipboard from DrawPlus and then in Microsoft WordPad I use Paste Special… then I am offered two options. Using either of them I can get the shape and colour into a WordPad document.

When using colour fonts to the OpenType specification, the glyph is not coloured directly. The glyph is coloured with a palette index number. There is then one or more palettes that relate the palette index numbers to RGBA colours.

I enjoy using FontCreator and other computer applications yet I know little of the way that they work inside the code and I do not know much about how the clipboard works.

Yet, as I have found it possible to copy and paste the Cadmium Yellow Primrose colour from DrawPlus to WordPad, I am wondering if it would be possible and if so would it be implementable please without a disproportionate amount of work, for High-Logic to add a facility that a font designer could display the FontCreator palette dialogue panel, highlight a colour palette cell, then use Edit Paste Colour and then FontCreator would automatically obtain the colour from the clipboard and set the highlighted palette colour to that colour.

William Overington

12 August 2013

[Alfred]

@William

I have found it possible to copy and paste the Cadmium Yellow Primrose colour from DrawPlus to WordPad

I don’t think it’s possible to copy a colour from DrawPlus to WordPad; as far as I know, you can only copy a (coloured) object and paste it as an image. If you could copy a fill rather than a filled object from DrawPlus, what would you expect to happen in FontCreator if the fill in question were a gradient, plasma or bitmap fill?

[William]

Thank you for replying.

@Alfred

@William

I have found it possible to copy and paste the Cadmium Yellow Primrose colour from DrawPlus to WordPad

I don’t think it’s possible to copy a colour from DrawPlus to WordPad; as far as I know, you can only copy a (coloured) object and paste it as an image. If you could copy a fill rather than a filled object from DrawPlus, what would you expect to happen in FontCreator if the fill in question were a gradient, plasma or bitmap fill?

Earlier in my post I had written as follows.

@William

If I copy the shape onto the clipboard from DrawPlus and then in Microsoft WordPad I use Paste Special… then I am offered two options. Using either of them I can get the shape and colour into a WordPad document.

Later I wrote as follows.

@William

Yet, as I have found it possible to copy and paste the Cadmium Yellow Primrose colour from DrawPlus to WordPad, I am wondering if …

I accept that that sentence lacks precision and is ambiguous.

What I was trying to say is better expressed as follows.

Yet, as I have found it possible, using copy and paste, to transfer from DrawPlus to WordPad, by using the clipboard, adequate information about the desired colour so as to reproduce it, I am wondering if it would be possible and if so would it be implementable please without a disproportionate amount of work, for High-Logic to add a facility that a font designer could display the FontCreator palette dialogue panel, highlight a colour palette cell, then use Edit Paste Colour and then FontCreator would automatically obtain the colour from the clipboard and set the highlighted palette colour to that colour.

@Alfred

If you could copy a fill rather than a filled object from DrawPlus, what would you expect to happen in FontCreator if the fill in question were a gradient, plasma or bitmap fill?

Well, as it was not a flat colour, I would feel that if FontCreator returned a dialogue panel mentioning that only a flat colour can be transferred, that that would be reasonable.

William

[Alfred]

@William

I have found it possible, using copy and paste, to transfer from DrawPlus to WordPad, by using the clipboard, adequate information about the desired colour so as to reproduce it

The problem, as I see it, is that you are not transferring information about the desired colour (at least, not in isolation). What you are transferring via the Windows clipboard is image data, some of which is colour information, and what you are requesting is akin to asking WordPad to take the fill colour of an image and apply it to a piece of text.

It’s a nice idea, but I very much doubt that it is achievable. That’s what screen colour pickers are for.

[William]

@William

Yet, as I have found it possible, using copy and paste, to transfer from DrawPlus to WordPad, by using the clipboard, adequate information about the desired colour so as to reproduce it, I am wondering if it would be possible and if so would it be implementable please without a disproportionate amount of work, for High-Logic to add a facility that a font designer could display the FontCreator palette dialogue panel, highlight a colour palette cell, then use Edit Paste Colour and then FontCreator would automatically obtain the colour from the clipboard and set the highlighted palette colour to that colour.

@Alfred

The problem, as I see it, is that you are not transferring information about the desired colour (at least, not in isolation).

Well, the information about the colour is not in isolation, but it is there.

I do not know much about how the clipboard works, yet the people at High-Logic are experts in the internal workings of software packages.

The reason that I mentioned WordPad at all is because it is made by a company that is different from the company that makes DrawPlus. Had I mentioned copying from DrawPlus, made by Serif, to another Serif product, then that would not have shown a clear case that the colour information were on the clipboard because, hypothetically, Serif might have been using proprietary Serif codes meaningless to the software of other manufacturers or Serif might have been using codes available to all.

@Alfred

What you are transferring via the Windows clipboard is image data, some of which is colour information, and what you are requesting is akin to asking WordPad to take the fill colour of an image and apply it to a piece of text.

Well, I suppose that it is in some ways akin to that if I were writing to Microsoft and asking Microsoft to enhance WordPad. Maybe that could be done by Microsoft. It had not occurred to me to ask for that. However, that could be a useful facility.

However, I am not here making a request to Microsoft about WordPad, I am making a request to High-Logic about FontCreator.

I am wondering if it would be possible and if so would it be implementable please without a disproportionate amount of work, for High-Logic to add a facility that a font designer could display the FontCreator palette dialogue panel, highlight a colour palette cell, then use Edit Paste Colour and then FontCreator would automatically obtain the colour from the clipboard and set the highlighted palette colour to that colour.

I do not know, at the time of writing this post, if it is possible to extract the colour information from the information on the clipboard.

@Alfred

It’s a nice idea, but I very much doubt that it is achievable.

Well, I am thinking that it might be achievable. It depends on whether it is possible to identify and to extract the colour information from amongst all of the information that is on the clipboard.

@Alfred

That’s what screen colour pickers are for.

If someone wishes to suggest having a colour picker tool, then that is fine, yet that is a different request from the request that I have made in this thread.

William Overington

13 August 2013