Re: Canvas shortcomings

[Mark <jamess1 wwnet net>]

On 17 Jun 2001, Peter Williams wrote:
 
> 
> I'm no expert, but as I said, my gut feeling is that it would take a
> long time to teach GTK+ to render in postscript.
>

You could probably make a wrapper to make the transition easier, so gtk+
does not sit directly on postscript but a layer above.

I think it is crucial though to avoid making this a toolkit specific
thing. The original X developer purposely left the look and feel to be
determined by the particular application. I think this was a very wise
decision, as it doesn't limit what you can do with X. A desktop and a
touch-screen kiosk might have very different UIs, but they can both be
implemented on X. The major gaping hole X left was the high level drawing
kit, only very primitive commands can be sent to X. The NeWS system
addresses this with a postscript drawing model. The only problem is that
NeWS is not freely available to my knowlege. So, if we can
agree that some higher level graphics kit is needed for present
applications and future ones, and it can be implemented in a general way,
this can benifit all free desktops. Just as improvements to X benefit all
desktops built on X.

BTW, I'm not an expert either, I've been doing research and hope to learn
enough to where I can improve the current implementation of DPS. If Gnome
and other desktops could agree at this level, that would make such work
very rewarding.

Mark