When you read a PDF document or a website and you select a paragraph to copy-paste in a document you are writing, the source is automatically added after it. The URL or the title of the PDF-document for example.

Like this, you can copy-paste all kinds of information together in a draft document and when you finally get to writing the document months or even years later, you can easily find back where you found all those carefully selected quotes.

The ordinary copy-paste should function as usual, the source-stamp should only be added when you hold down Command-V-S for example, with the s for source-stamp.

I would like to see it incorporated OS-wide in Mac OS X.
-- rrr, Mar 24 2003

Spy on it http://www.spyonit.com
Tracks changes in websites, this could be a feature of the source stamp, like urbanmatador suggests. [rrr, Oct 17 2004]

Sounds like you're too lazy to type your own source page.

Having said that, this could be added by the author/publisher for copyright infringement protection and as such will likely proliferate soon. Get cracking! I want to see twenty lines of code on my desk by noon tomorrow.
-- ato_de, Mar 24 2003


Well, I think it's a good idea but agree that DRM schemes may soon incorporate features like this.
-- bristolz, Mar 24 2003


I think this could be most easily implemented by modifying the copy rather than the paste, so that additional data is placed into the clipboard, but this would not allow you to choose whether to paste the extended info or not.

Alternatively, in Windows, it is possible to store data in a number of different formats on the clipboard and to specify new formats, so it should be simple for an application to add a format which includes source data and for other applications to read that data. You would need to modify the source and destination applications to manage the transfer this way.

(Per Dijamanda, I don't think ideas have to be wacky or involve custard to be valid on this site.)
-- pottedstu, Mar 24 2003


Encarta does something akin to this already and it certainly isn't destination-application specific.
-- bristolz, Mar 24 2003


jutta, how to avoid such a history for a file growing endlessly? When I open a MS-Word file with a normal text-editor I get to see all kinds of history. Even the names of printers a previous writer on the document once used. There is so much hidden in a MS-Word file that an empty document is already 36K!
-- rrr, Mar 24 2003


Ravenswood, the result of such a copy-paste operation would be:

I would like to see it incorporated OS-wide in Mac OS X. http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Copy-paste_20with_20source_20stamp/ Mar 24 2003

Or if it would be taken from a document on my harddisk

MacSOUP should run on any Mac from the Mac Plus on; file:///Users/rrr/Documents/Nerdish/Manuals/Apple/MacSOUP_20Manual.pdf May 01 2000

just a random PDF file on my disk, with creation date May 1 2000. I wonder if it's possible to link to a page in a PDF-document...
-- rrr, Apr 02 2003


//What happens when the original location, or existence of, the source document changes?//

this is a good point. the source annotation clearly has to be "live" and therefore self updating, automatically. whenever the document opens, the source annotations are checked automatically and updated as necessary, bothering the user only if the change is so drastic as to alter the originally intended context.

i'd also like to give kudos to dimnadja who has apparently commented on this idea without actually commenting...
-- urbanmatador, Apr 02 2003



random, halfbakery