Clipboard Support and Limitations
When a user works with a VirtualUI application in the browser, Thinfinity Workspace synchronizes the clipboard in both directions: content copied in the remote application can be pasted on the user’s device, and the other way around.
The synchronization is bounded by what web browsers allow a page to read from and write to the local clipboard. This page describes what crosses that boundary and what doesn’t.
Content That Synchronizes
| Content | Notes |
|---|---|
| Plain text | Both directions. |
| Formatted text (HTML) | Both directions. |
| Rich text (RTF) | Device to application only, and only when the target application accepts RTF. Content copied from the application reaches the device as plain text, HTML, or an image instead — not as RTF. |
| Images | Both directions. Images copied in the application reach the device as PNG; images copied on the device are accepted as PNG or JPEG. |
Content That Doesn’t Synchronize
Browsers only expose a limited set of standard content types to web pages. Clipboard formats that are specific to an application have no browser equivalent, so they can’t be transferred to or from the user’s device. Typical examples:
- Database objects copied from a data-bound control
- Vector shapes and drawing objects
- Embedded documents and other OLE objects
When the user copies content in one of these formats, the standard representations the application places alongside it — usually plain text or an image — are synchronized instead, if the application provides them.
These limitations come from the browser platform, not from the Access Profile configuration. They apply to every browser and operating system.
Copying Within the Application
The behavior described above concerns moving content between the application and the user’s device. Copying and pasting within the application itself is a separate case.
Right-click Copy and Paste work for the application’s own content, including proprietary formats such as shapes and database objects. Keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V) work for the content types the browser clipboard can carry.
For proprietary content the browser cannot represent, reliable in-application Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V can be enabled through a passive clipboard option in the VirtualUI configuration. In this mode the operating system handles the clipboard entirely inside the session, so keyboard copy and paste behave as they would on a local desktop, for any content the application supports.
Passive clipboard has a trade-off: while it is enabled, the clipboard is scoped to the application session — content is not exchanged with the user’s local device. Choose it when in-application copy and paste of specialized content matters more than sharing the clipboard with the local machine.
When an image is copied with a keyboard shortcut from certain Windows applications — for example, the Photos viewer — some browsers (notably Chrome and Edge) may paste an empty image. This is a browser and operating-system clipboard behavior: those applications place the image on the clipboard as a file reference rather than as image data. Copying the same image from an application that puts true image data on the clipboard, such as Paint, works as expected.
See also