Re: Some 2.6 thinking

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Juhana said:

> Hello.
>
> I would like to have an offscreen rendering of the GTK widgets.
> User would define the fixed pixmap size and the widgets would
> be rendered to that. Events would be delivered by API calls.
> Possible applications: (1) GUI color enchangement for visually
> impaired, (2) warped GUIs (fish-eye zoom, fun-looking GUIs), (3)
> composed GUIs -- alpha channel and transparency could be included to
> the rendering prior flattening to the screen.
>  
Probably what you want is the COMPOSITE X extension, which is
available in the freedesktop.org "modular" x server, and which will 
probably
propagate out to the XORG foundation server before too long.  For a lot 
of reasons,
it's better to do this with server-side support as opposed to just 
rendering
widgets offscreen in the client library.

COMPOSITE allows all the X windows to be virtualized, i.e. kept in 
offscreen buffers, then
a "compositing manager" takes those windows and puts them onscreen via 
whatever
combinations it likes.  It enables all sorts of on-the-fly changes to 
windows, like
recoloring, rescaling, warping, etc.  It also gives you alpha blending 
and RGBA x visuals.

The OpenGL stuff is in the pipeline too, from the X point of view.  
Check out
http://www.freedesktop.org/

- Bill

> I also would like to have such an OpenGL support that GTK could
> have OpenGL based widgets. GTK's box layout hierarchy could
> extend to OpenGL side (and be used optionally): e.g., OpenGL-area
> could be spliced with the viewport frustums (pyramides).
>
> Regards,
> Juhana
>
>  
>
>