Re: why so few themes are shipped with gnome-1.4?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Lee Mallabone <lee fonicmonkey net> writes:

> Nathan Hurst wrote:
> 
> > I would advocate fixing/reimplementing the pixmap theme to use pixbuf and
> > to have considerable effort put into minimising the memory usage.  Not
> > that I'm offering...  It would be a good project though.
> 
> Didn't someone already do this? I seem to remember a post on
> (gtk).themes.org a while ago that gave links to a pixbuf engine.
> 
> I don't know how well maintained it is/was though.

The pixbuf-engine module in CVS is a "port" of the pixmap engine to 
GdkPixbuf. (Actually, it was an almost complete rewrite, but the
theme format is the same.)

It's in pretty good repair, if you happen to be using GTK+-1.3.x ;-)

The claims on themes.org about this engine were greatly exagerated,
however, and in fact, there was good evidence that some of the people
posting there weren't using it at all, but the pixmap engine,
and the effect they were noticing was purely placebo!

It's probably a bit faster than the pixmap engine and definitely uses
less memory worst case, but despite gdk-pixbuf's hand-written
MMX ASM scaling routines (tm), the main advantages are:

 - Clean code
 - Filtered scaling

Regards,
                                        Owen