How do I send docx formatted text from org-mode to the clipboard with pandoc?

Question

I'd like to use send highlighted text from .org documents to the clipboard in the docx format. I've tried the following:

       (defun region-to-clip ()
        "Copies region between point and mark to the clipboard"
        (interactive)
        (shell-command-on-region
         (mark)
         (point)
         "pandoc -f org -t docx | xclip -sel clip &> /dev/null"))

Testing this with the following org text:

****** Heading 1

******* Heading 2

1. Element 1
2. Element 2

gives:

PK###

when pasted into Libre Office. I get the same result using odt as the target output from pandoc, but something more reasonable if I choose markdown. The markdown is ok, but ultimately I'd like to also take advantage of pandoc's reference-doc for formatting docx output.

Answer 1

I wrote ox-clip (https://melpa.org/#/ox-clip) and it works with your example. It covers windows, Mac and Linux for this. The gist is similar to your approach, but it goes through html. The linux version is similar to your approach, but uses the command (https://github.com/jkitchin/ox-clip/blob/ff117cf3c619eef12eccc0ccbfa3f11adb73ea68/ox-clip.el#L83)

xclip -verbose -i \"%f\" -t text/html -selection clipboard

and goes through an intermediate file that is created.