Copy and paste in the context of PARC (company)

Copying is the duplication of information or an artifact based on an instance of that information or artifact, and not using the process that originally generated it. With analog forms of information, copying is only possible to a limited degree of accuracy, which depends on the quality of the equipment used and the skill of the operator. There is some inevitable generation loss, deterioration and accumulation of "noise" (random small changes) from original to copy when copies are made. This deterioration accumulates with each generation. With digital forms of information, copying is perfect. Copy and paste is frequently used by a computer user when they select and copy an area of text or content.

DjVu is a computer file format designed primarily to store scanned documents, especially those containing a combination of text, line drawings, indexed color images, and photographs. It uses technologies such as image layer separation of text and background/images, progressive loading, arithmetic coding, and lossy compression for bitonal (monochrome) images. This allows high-quality, readable images to be stored in a minimum of space, so that they can be made available on the web.

DjVu has been promoted as providing smaller files than PDF for most scanned documents. The DjVu developers report that color magazine pages compress to 40–70 kB, black-and-white technical papers compress to 15–40 kB, and ancient manuscripts compress to around 100 kB; a satisfactory JPEG image typically requires 500 kB. Like PDF, DjVu can contain an OCR text layer, making it easy to perform copy and paste and text search operations.

Copy-and-paste programming, sometimes referred to as just pasting, is the production of highly repetitive computer programming code, as produced by copy and paste operations. It is primarily a pejorative term; those who use the term are often implying a lack of programming competence and ability to create abstractions. It may also be the result of technology limitations (e.g., an insufficiently expressive development environment) as subroutines or libraries would normally be used instead. However, there are occasions when copy-and-paste programming is considered acceptable or necessary, such as for boilerplate, loop unrolling (when not supported automatically by the compiler), languages with limited metaprogramming facilities, or certain programming idioms, and it is supported by some source code editors in the form of snippets.