Dragging text from SMART

[gec]

When I drag text from SMART to AS2, all I get is a series of '? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?'. Dragging from Word is fine. Any ideas?
I tihnk the same thing happened from Serif Draw too, but I'm not 100% sure - it's a few weeks since I tried to do it.

[Margaret Allen]

If this is the case then I would suggest it is because we are unable to read SMARTnotebook files because they are encrypted in some way. Try copying and pasting from ntbk to AS. If this doesn't work you may need to copy and paste into word and then try dragging across....

[clap]

[djmitchella]

I think this is because SMART's software is Unicode (supports non-English charactersets), but presumably Promethean's software isn't.

You'll see the same problem trying to drag text out of Notebook to Notepad or any 8-bit text editor; if you drag it into Wordpad, the text goes over fine because Wordpad supports multiple character sets. It might be worth asking SMART if they have plans to support it in future versions and/or if Promethean have plans to ActivStudio support Unicode. Cut and paste directly will have the same problems as drag and drop, they use the same stuff behind the scenes, so you'd have to cut from SMART's software, paste it into Wordpad, then go from Wordpad to ActivStudio.

Weirdly, if you try and drag text out of ActivStudio to anywhere (Notepad or SMART's software), it can't be dropped, and in that case it entirely vanishes from ActivStudio, which seems like a different sort of bug to me.

I don't see how it could have anything to do with saving files, though, that's just because of the different sorts of compression that SMART and Promethean use for their files -- neither of them make any sense to the "naked eye", after all.

[gec]

Very interesting! Looks like one for the AS2 development team to chew over.

[djmitchella]

Actually, I played around a bit more, and I'm wrong -- if you write (say) Greek text in Word and paste it into ActivStudio, it'll appear just fine, so I guess ActivStudio must be Unicode as well. Not sure what's different between text pasted from Word and the same text pasted from SMART Notebook, though.

[Peter Lambert]

Yes, the latest versions of ACTIV software are unicode.

Would be interested to find out if you can copy and paste text from Smart Notebook to ACTIVstudio. We actually don't know the Smart text box format, so dragging and dropping is not a feature we support.

[djmitchella]

Okay, here's some more test results:

copying from ActivStudio(v2) to:
SMART Notebook: works, font and colour preserved, but somewhere along the line, it's turned into a bitmap rather than text, so I can't edit it any more
Wordpad: ditto, it's a bitmap
Word: ditto.
Notepad: can't paste at all (reasonable enough, given it's a bitmap..)

copying from SMART Notebook (v9) to:
ActivStudio: can paste, font and colour preserved, but as mentioned, the text turns into a bunch of ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Wordpad: works, font and colour preserved, and it's actually pasted as text rather than a bitmap
Word: ditto.
Notepad: weirdly, today I _can_ paste.

Oh, I think I know what was going on yesterday; I copied from ActivStudio to SMART Notebook, so it got turned into a bitmap because that's what ActivStudio puts on the clipboard, then when I tried to paste from SMART Notebook into Windows Notepad, I couldn't do it any more because I was trying to paste a bitmap. If I start off with new text in SMART Notebook, then that gets put onto the clipboard as text, so I can paste it into Notepad okay from there.

Not sure why the text turns into ? ? ? ?s when it goes into ActivStudio, ActivStudio seems to be the only thing that has this problem.

And here's a workaround, after a bit more playing around. If you select the entire object in Notebook and try and paste it as a whole thing, ActivStudio doesn't like it.

If you start editing the text in Notebook, select the whole text while in edit mode, copy _that_ to the clipboard and then into ActivStudio, then somehow it works, and then the font and colour and stuff are preserved.. It looks as if Notebook copies the text to the clipboard differently when you're editing it than when you're not editing it, which is very peculiar.

So this may be a solution for the original poster -- it's a pretty awkward way to do things, but it might be worth thinking about.

[djmitchella]

Oh, and I was more curious, so I grabbed a clipboard viewer (clipboard viewer X, which I have installed from somewhere or other). Here's the list of clipboard formats that come from SMART Notebook when copying text to the clipboard:
OLE data object
SMART_XBK_XML
SMART_XBK_XML_FEEDBACKHINT
Enhanced Metafile
Rich Text Format
Text
Unicode Text
Ole Private Data
Locale
OEM Text
Metafile picture

so my guess is that the bug's in Promethean's code and it's not noticing that there's a 'text' version of things on the clipboard, it's trying to use one of the other ones and getting confused. It certainly looks as if Notebook is providing the data in a lot of different formats; looking at the contents, the text is just the text, the metafiles are pictures of the text, etc.

Comparing this to ActivStudio, if I copy text to the clipboard from there, I get these formats:
Bitmap
DIB Bitmap
DIB V5 Image

which would certainly explain why it always shows up as a bitmap..