Re: The best way to draw pixels?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, 29 Oct 1999, Jamie wrote:
> 
> I disagree, it is not a good tutorial unless you know what you are doing
> with pixmaps, and Xwindows. It is very basic, and does not cover any
> real information on drawing in X windows.
>

Did you have a look at the GDK chapter of my book? "Scribble" gives you
what you need to get stuff on the screen; then my book has all the details
on the many different ways to draw with GDK.
 
Another useful resource is the Xlib book; GDK is just Xlib. Seriously,
it's pretty much exactly the same.

> A good tutorial would start off by giving the different options for
> drawing graphics to the screen, and which option to choose for which
> application (one off drawing, animations, dynamic pixel graphics ...)
> The tutorial would then go on and give examples of how to do them,
> different options and everything.
> 

Well, this is not _really_ what GTK+ is for. You can use a special "area"
widget (drawing area, GtkGLArea) within GTK in order to draw, but GTK is
really high-level UI widgets.

This would be a nice tutorial to have, granted. It could also include
structured graphics options like the canvas...

The canvas has two chapters in my book also, which probably aren't
interesting for this application but may help.

> Thanks for the help (no sarcasm there), but either I am looking in the
> wrong place or this gdkRGB has no documentation. It seems that it
> doesn't provide what I need anyway, because for every image (where the
> word image is used in the generic sense) I have (Which, incidentally is
> connected to one top level window and drawing_area) it needs to be
> 32bit, and have it's only color map associated with it.
>

GdkRGB basically has one function: render RGB data to a drawable. 
Visuals and colormaps and various RGB data formats complicate this
slightly. But between the reference docs and the stuff in my book you
should be OK.
 
We do have a shortage of docs in certain areas but there are lots of docs,
including www.gtk.org/rdp (almost complete reference docs), my book
(covers object/widget system well, canvas, and GDK, though not in tutorial
format), GTK Tutorial which is a nice introduction. I hope you'll stick
with it...

Havoc