Copy-Paste and Drag and Drop
Marvin has three type of commands to place objects on the clipboard: Copy, Copy As and Copy as MRV/OLE/Smiles.
- Copy: the structure is copied to the clipboard in a couple of formats.
The molecule always will be there in mrv, MDL Molfile, and DayLight SMILES formats.
The other formats (like Plain Text or Bitmap Image) are optional.
- Copy As: a dialog is displayed to select in which format the molecule will be placed to the clipboard.
- Copy as MRV/OLE/Smiles: the string of the structure is copied to the clipboard.
Any file format of Marvin can be copied to the clipboard as string or plain text.
Marvin can place more than one clipboard objects on the clipboard, each represents the same molecule in different format. Copy from MarvinSketch supports the following representations:
- Marvin Document (mrv): Marvin's own format. Only MarvinSketch can paste it.
- MDL Molfile: a popular molecule description format. A lot of chemical drawing tool can paste it like Marvin, ChemDraw, etc.
- Daylight SMILES: wide range molecule format. Several chemical editor can paste it. In a few editor, SMILES can not be pasted directly. E.g. ChemDraw uses the "Paste Special/SMILES" option to copy SMILES from the clipboard.
- Daylight SMARTS: a chemical format for specifying substructural patterns in molecules. Compared to SMILES, SMARTS is a more general notation thanks to its use of extended sets of atomic and bond symbols and logical operators, which make SMARTS a useful tool in substructure searching.
- Plain Text (molecule source): To be able to copy the molecule source into text editors or into other application that do not support chemical formats.
- Bitmap Image: To paste molecule image into presentations or into documents.
- Vector Graphical Image (EMF): The vector graphics is scalable unlike bitmap image. It can be pasted into MS-Office documents or into other applications that support Enhanced MetaFile format.
- OLE object: To copy a Marvin OLE object into MS-Office. This format is supported by Windows. To be able to paste it into an MS-Office document, you need an installed version of Marvin for .NET You can read more about OLE support in Marvin OLE User's Guide.
A couple of formats are not available on a few platforms.
Most versions of Microsoft Office prefer pasting image instead of text if the content of the clipboard is available in both formats. But there are a few ones that paste text as default. In that case, you should use "Paste As Special" option in MS-Office to paste it as image but it can be unconformable to someone. The workaround can be the restriction of the text copy from Marvin. That is the reason why text copy is disabled in the default settings of Marvin (on a couple of platforms).
In that case, we recommend Copy As or Copy as SMILES to paste text into MS-Word and in other editors. Another solution can be to change the default options of the Copy command (see above how to do it).
If we compare Bitmap and Vector Graphical Image formats, the situation is the same as in the previous case (text vs. image). Most of the applications prefer bitmap image although they can accept vector graphical images as an Enhanced MetaFile (EMF), like MS-Word. Since vector graphics are scalable unlike bitmap images, EMF is chosen as default from image formats (where it is supported).
Marvin can paste SMILES strings, MDL MolFiles, etc. from a text editor as molecules.
X Window System: most text editors (xedit, emacs, gvim, etc.) do not transfer data to the X clipboard, so Marvin is unable to communicate with them. Copy&Paste works with the following editors and other programs:
- GNOME programs : gedit, gnotepad+ (gnp), gxedit, etc.
- Motif programs : asWedit, nedit, Netscape, etc.
With the xclipboard program, you can test whether your favorite editor uses the X clipboard or not.