Re: gtk_paint_string future

[Matej Knopp <knopp users sourceforge net>]

Dňa St, 2002-06-05 at 22:18, Daniel Elstner napísal:
> Am Mit, 2002-06-05 um 21.21 schrieb Matej Knopp:
> > 
> > I'm writing an application and have chosen Gtk+ 2.0 for the gui. During
> > the programming I came to a very significant problem. The main window
> > consists of a pane with GtkTextView and GtkTreeView. The text view is
> > fine but the tree view almost made me abanon Gtk. It has 12 columns
> > (text) and after it's filled working with the app turns to be a pain.
> > Some experimentation showed the reason: GtkCellRendererText (and Pango).
> > Resizing the window, moving the pane or resizing columns was so delayed
> > that the app was absolutely unusable for production. I like pango and
> > the way it works but computing unicode layout and painting it so many
> > times was a too big deal even for duron 850. So I decided let unicode be
> > a wrote my own simple text renderer that converts unicode to 8 bit local
> > enc. and draws it with gtk_paint_string. It works suprisingly well.
> 
> I just can't stand it.  That's so damn egoistic.  Yes, I honestly hope
> others will be able to help you with the performance problems.  But
> performance reasons just can't be taken as an excuse for not using
> Unicode.  Did you realize that most people on this world speak languages
> which cannot be represented in an 8bit encoding?

Yes, I did. But the app is very specific and I doubt anyone out of my
country would find any use for it. It's not a problem to add a feature
that would allow you to switch to unicode but this is not the point.
Forcing me to use unicode (removing gtk_paint_string) would almost equal
to forcing me to change toolkit because The application would be
unusable for the people here who need it no matter how many languages it
could render.


> > So my question is: How long will the gtk_paint_string be in Gtk+?
> > I know gtk_paint_string is deprecated but it seems to be the only thing
> > that can make my app usable. Can I count on it in future? 
> > I also know that with gtk_paint_string there's no bi-di, antialiasing,
> > etc. but I'd give all these for fast text output.
> 
> It would be much better to ask how you can make the Pango version
> faster.  I suspect it *might* a problem on your side, a Duron 850 is not
> slow enough to render your app "unusable".

I can hardly imagine the rendering could undertake some significant
optimization without huge increasing of the memory consumption. 
I've mentioned the other possible optimizations but I don't dare to do
it myself (I'm not a GtkTreeView hacker...).

> --Daniel

-matej.