Wysiwyg with image copy/paste

Question

First, I understand that an image cannot be "copied" from a local machine into a website. I understand that it must be uploaded. I am a web programmer, and am familiar with common web wysiwyg tools such as TinyMCE and FCKEditor. My question is if there exists a program or web module or something of the sort that works will perform an automatic upload of images for a wysiwyg. I have a client that is constantly complaining about not being able to copy/paste documents with images from MS Word into a wysiwyg to create content on their website.

I have looked into TX Text Control (http://labs.textcontrol.com/) and was looking into a possibly flash wysiwyg that could upload the file automatically behind the scenes. I don't know if this exists, and google did not much help me in my search, so I thought I would ask other coders.

I am open to any sort of server technology, or browser requirements. I am looking for some browser based tool instead of an application tool such as Dreamweaver or otherwise.

If no good solution to the problem exists, I am willing to accept that at this point.

Note: This was a request from a client, and to me it seemed rather unreasonable. I decided to gather community advice instead of just tell the client 'No' and the options here have been extremely helpful and informative in presenting possible solutions.

Answer 1

You might find inspiration from ScreenshotMe.

Basically you need different parts:

• something that takes the image out of the clipboard and uploads it to the web: this could be a java applet, flash or firefox extensions. Flash or Java would have the advantage of being cross browser
• then you use the <canvas> tag to display the image once it has been uploaded (use explorercanvas to bring canvas to Internet Explorer)

As I pointed out in my comment, Google is discontinuing gears in favor of HTML5, have a look at 7 User Interaction - HTML 5.

EDIT:

HTML5 when implemented is supposed to interact with the system's clipboard. I imagine the following scenario would work:

• paste the image data from clipboard to canvas
• get the canvas pixel data back as an image using toDataURL(): see Canvas2Image
• upload the image to server when submitting: see Saving canvas image with PHP

Until HTML5 copy/paste drag&drop is implemented, you'll have to rely on Flash or a (signed) Java applet to interact with the clipboard.