Electronic devices typically run an operating system for controlling the base level functionality of the electronic device. To add additional or specialized functionality to the electronic device, the operating system can execute one or more registered or unregistered applications. Registered applications typically comply with some predetermined application programming interface (API) to ensure efficient and easy interoperability with the operating system. Data, such as text data, can be sent back and forth between the registered applications and the operating system; however, the electronic device has no mechanism for sharing text data between the operating system and other unregistered applications. Unregistered applications often include integrated graphics engines and output data to the display without using the electronic device's graphics engine. In some instances of unregistered applications, text is rendered as an image and underlying text data for rendering text is lost for sharing with the operating system and other applications.
To enable sharing of text data between various applications, some conventional systems have implemented basic variations of “copy-and-paste” functionality. In such solutions, a user selects text or images displayed on the graphical user interface of the electronic device, initiates a copy or cut command, opens another application, selects a field, and initiates a paste command. Whatever text or image that was copied will be inserted in the field selected by the user. However, only information displayed by an active instance of the operating system or standalone application as rendered text can be selected and copied into active memory as text data. Any text that is rendered as an image with no underlying renderable text data is unavailable for copying and pasting between applications. In such scenarios, a user may need to enter the text manually into another application.
Accordingly, traditional cut-and-paste operations have various drawbacks and deficiencies with respect to sharing mixed type text data, i.e., rendered text and rendered images with embedded text, among multiple applications and the operating system. One specific issue with cut-and-paste operations involves the limited nature with which the text can be pasted into multiple applications simultaneously. To enter the copied text into multiple applications at the same time, a user would need to launch each application and perform the pasting function into each of the desired text fields individually. Such manual processes are laborious and time-consuming. Additionally, traditional cut-and-paste operations are limited to the selection of rendered text and cannot select text presented on a graphical user interface that is rendered as an image, i.e., a picture depicting words.