Usage of Clipboard as hidden I/O pipe instead input text file and output image file

Question

It would be nice to use plantuml.jar without external file based I/O. Let say before calling of "java -jar plantuml.jar …" wir will place in clipboard over CF_TEXT mode a text which usually need to be stored in a text file. Over special option plantuml.jar takes this text from clipboard and after rendering in an internal bitmap places this bitmap over CF_BITMAP into clipboard also instead to store this image as PNG file. So it will really accelerate generation of multiple expressions (100 and more) over calling "java -jar plantuml.jar …" from parent application.

Look https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff729168(v=vs.85).aspx

Answer 1

This is a strange idea, we like it :-)

So with last beta http://beta.plantuml.net/plantuml.jar you can run PlantUML in some "clipboard loop" mode:

java -jar plantuml.jar -verbose -clipboardloop

In this mode, PlantUML looks every 10 s into the clipboard.If it gets some text starting with "@start", it generates an image and put it back in the clipboard. Is this the expected behaviour ?

BTW, there is also a FTP mode (see http://plantuml.com/ftp ) which also allows multiple generations without having to start PlantUML for each image.

Answer 2

It is not exactly what we need. We will access plantuml.jar very randomly. It can be single expression or multiple formulas at once. But we need a single call of plantuml.jar per expression. The "-clipboard" option must indicate a start of special mode for plantuml.jar. It looks in clipboard for text and ALWAYS generates a bitmap. That means, if an erroneuos state (no text, bad syntax, etc) will be occur, then a bitmap "Bad Input data" or similar schould be placed in clipboard. In our software it will be immediately visualized. As example i provide a some fragment of our symbolic processor

http://picsee.net/upload/2018-06-01/c90fc8abe9ce.jpg

The expressions will be first translated in AsciiMath text with colors and font states and then over call to plantuml.jar rendered in bitmaps. So we doing a loop over expresssions and will use in this loop plantuml.jar for current  expression on the fly :-)

PS. Usage of FTP is limited for our clients due to their offline state or many restrictions to access an online service.

Comments

Ok, understand.
With last beta http://beta.plantuml.net/plantuml.jar, you can now have:
java -jar plantuml.jar -clipboard

Tell us if it's what you are expecting!

PS: please do not create a new question and reuse this thread. Thanks!

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YES! Perfect - exactly what we need! Thank you very much for extremly fast response :-)