Re: gnome-mag and gnopernicus magnifier services TODOs

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi Carlos:

Carlos Eduardo Rodrigues Diogenes wrote:

> Hi,
>
> We are with a group in a university studying accessibility and we want 
> to know what gnome-mag and gnopernicus needs to improve and what is 
> essencial to do now to grant a good development in the future, because 
> we think that if us start to develop in other way that don't be 
> compatible with these projects is an duplication of efforts.
>
> What must be implemented in gnome-mag and gnopernicus to improve the 
> magnifier services?
>
> I used gnopernicus and saw that the magnifier service provided by 
> gnome-mag have some problems when it's started, leaving the magnifier 
> area with a lot of trash and after some time of use the update of the 
> trashed areas stay ok. Why the trashed areas don't works fine after 
> the start of the application? What it can be and what must be done to 
> solve it?

This bug was recently fixed in CVS.  Try updating your gnome-mag to 
version 0.12.1. or cvs HEAD.

> What are the plans in gnome-mag, mainly for the full-screen. There is 
> any roadmap of what can be used to acquire a good full-screen service.

Fullscreen magnification now works if you use a recent Xserver with the 
DAMAGE and XFIXES extension, and with the 'dummy driver' virtual frame 
buffer configured.  Please see a recent version of the Gnome 
Accessibility Guide appendices for technical information on configuring 
this.

> I saw this video http://vizzzion.org/stuff/xgl_wanking.avi and is 
> showed some operations in zoom in and out with very amazing results 
> (anyone can identify what was used to acquire that?). The Composite 
> Extension is a good solution?

That demo uses GL to do lots of its rendering.  There is talk of moving 
much of the X server to using GL for its rendering, so we'd get a lot of 
this performance "for free" then.

Composite will help too, but gnome-mag doesn't include any code that 
uses COMPOSITE yet; doing so will require a significant amount of new 
gnome-mag development.

Either Olaf or Gunnar Schmidt (sorry, I can't remember which of the two 
is working on this at the moment) is currently working on a 
COMPOSITE-based magnifier for the free desktop.  There are a few 
technical issues which need to be solved in the extensions/xserver 
itself before such a composite-based magnifier can become a practical 
reality.  The primary issues have to do with conversions between the two 
resulting mouse coordinate systems, and ensuring that the mouse pointer 
appears at the appropriate position on screen (and the no "extra" mouse 
cursor appears).

> I run once full-screen magnification with a dummy device, but the 
> results aren't very good. The magnified area sometimes stay only in 
> 1/4 of the screen, there are ways to control this?

This sounds like a configuration issue, possibly in gnopernicus.  I am 
not aware of any problem with using the entire physical screen as the 
magnified area.  Again,  updating your gnome-mag and gnopernicus 
versions to the latest available may solve this for you.

> Someone here saw Lunar or ZoomText magnifier for Windows? They have 
> some resources very interesting in half magnifier screen mode. How the 
> same effect can be acquired? I think that using the composite 
> extension can be a way. What do you think?
>
> The documentation of gnopernicus (the magnifier part) and gnome-mag 
> are very poor. What is the better thing to do, an API reference with 
> doxygen or class diagrams? An API reference is simple to generate with 
> doxygen, why this was not done yet? There is no need for it yet?

We haven't introduced a dependency on doxygen yet, but I agree that it 
would be a good idea.  If someone wants to produce a patch to run 
doxygen if it is available, then I will update the inline source 
documents so that the result is more clear.

Bill

> Thanks,
> Carlos.
>
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