Since the plants in PlantStudio are completely text-based, it’s easy to send them over email simply by including the text describing the plant in an email message. You could do this by hand, but to make it easier, PlantStudio can copy and paste text versions of plants.

To copy plants to the clipboard as text,

▪        Select the plants in the main window. 

▪        Choose Copy To Text from the Edit menu.

▪        In your word processor or email editor, choose Paste from the program’s Edit menu. The plant will appear as a long series of lines describing all the plant parameters. Plants can have a variable number of lines depending on what 3D objects they have, but normally a plant will have at least 300 lines.

To paste plants from the clipboard as text,

▪        In your word processor or email reader, select the text that describes one or more plants and choose Copy from the program’s Edit menu. Make sure you include all the text from the first line (which has the text “start PlantStudio plant” in it) to the last line (which has the text “end PlantStudio plant” in it). It doesn’t matter if you include extra lines at the beginning and end.

▪        In PlantStudio, choose Paste From Text from the Edit menu. If PlantStudio responds that there is a problem, go back and copy the whole plant(s) again.

Tips on copying and pasting plants as text

▪        Make sure your text editor doesn’t add extra carriage returns (line breaks) to the  text, because PlantStudio won’t be able to understand the parameter values on long lines. If you are copying the text from an email reader, make sure to turn off any line-wrapping option it might have. For example, in Netscape you should turn off the Wrap Long Lines command in the View menu.

▪        PlantStudio does check for wrapped lines and attempts to fix them. Whenever it concatenates two lines it thinks were meant to describe one parameter, it writes a message to the messages window. If you paste a plant as text and want to make sure it was read correctly, check the message window (choose Messages from the Window menu) to see if there are any messages there.

▪        Pasting plants as text uses the same mechanism as reading plants from text files, so the same cautions that apply to editing plant files outside the programEditing_plant_files_outside_the_program>main apply to copying, editing and pasting plants as text.

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