[LAD] pixmap based knob widgets and theme integration.

WRT the recent discussion about pixmap knob widgets and theme
conformance (that i can't reply to since i wasn't on the list
at the time, sorry)

there are a couple of ways that you might achieve this.
the crux gtk theme engine includes some pixmap recolouring code
(or used to at any rate). it recolours areas of a pixmap that
only contain green values to one specified in the gtkrc.
this might conceivably be stolen and incorporated
to provide some measure of theme conformance for pixmap
based widgets (knobs wheels and potentially sliders).

this method places specific constraints on the source pixmaps used,
constraints that are easily adhered to when creating pixel art
(which the crux pixmaps were) but procedurally generated rasters
(vector or 3d renders) of the kind that are likely to be used with
a pixmap widget might pose more of a problem since lighting and
anti aliasing probably induce a variety of colours.
still, i expect you could get something to work with a bit of effort.
(imagemagick or scriptfu in the gimp may help there).

another possibility that was briefly discussed for use with
phat was that of a composite widget with different layers that
could be drawn separately, one on top of the other. eg render an SVG
or pixmap as a background on the first pass, then draw something
with cairo (a value indicator..) on top.

there are obvious limits to what you can achieve with this kind of
thing, but you could get some complex effects on a knob while still
maintaining procedural control over the size, colour and shape of the
vector elements. (tick marks around the knob, value indicator size
and colour etc). IIRC we discarded the idea due to it's complexity.
we wanted a generally configurable knob and the vector elements would
need anything from extensive widget options right up to a full blown
markup language to describe them (not a problem for app specific
widgets).

cheers,
pete.

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Received on Mon Sep 27 00:15:03 2010