So my 8-year-old boy got all excited about PowerPoint, of all things, at school yesterday. He and his friends were using it to make single pages with cool typographic text and images pasted from off the web. He came home and wanted to do the same on our Linux box, so I set him up with Open Office Impress, which worked great for him, except…
The two commonly used X desktop apps that work the most horribly as far as cut-and-paste are concerned are, hands down, Firefox and Open Office. X Firefox refuses to copy images, as near as I can figure out. It will copy image URLs, but that's not too helpful. Meanwhile, even with an image on the clipboard, Open Office grays out the Paste entry in the edit menu, and doesn't have a paste popup.
It turns out, though, that if you use Konqueror instead of Firefox, you can copy an image using the popup fine. And if you hit the paste accelerator (control-V) in Open Office, it pastes the image just fine. Problem "solved".
One of the things I promised when I joined the X.Org Foundation Board was to work on cut-and-paste. I did some stuff, but never really got anywhere. I need to get on that again. #$@! X cut-and-paste. (B)