Re: Default theme

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gmail com>]

On Fri, 2005-07-15 at 17:50 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> > None of the other Great Monarchs have assumed power on this issue.
> > Thus I, as the GDP Fearless Leader, hereby declare this the new
> > default theme.  I don't want a long discussion about people's
> > favorite colors.  I want to start taking screenshots for our
> > under-loved documentation.
> 
> Calum Benson informed me there was a tool to generate "screenshots" from
> Glade files included in the tools to build the HIG (written by JRB if I
> recall correctly.)  I haven't actually got around to trying it out yet but
> I did file a request against Glade to provide this kind of functionality
> directly themselves:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=302065
> 
> It might not be much help to you but maybe it could cut down on some of
> the work you have to do to create all those screenshots.  I take a lot of
> screenshots too but probably nowhere near the quantity you must make.

Going back on-list.  Hope you don't mind.

The problem is that most of our screenshots can't be gotten from just
Glade files.  Many times, applications have some sort of custom widget:
the Nautilus icon view, the play area of any of the games, Gnumeric's
spreadsheet area.  Even when they don't, they usually need to have the
widgets populated with data: some text in the text view in Dictionary,
some CD tracks in the list view in Sound Juicer.

I would *love* to have a markup language that could fully describe
our screenshots, including populated data, non-windowed isolated
widgets, etc.  For über bonus points, make something that can be
composited with SVG.  If rendering to an image is fast enough, and
unobtrusive (no windows popping up and such), we could forego the
whole screenshot process, and just have them dynamically rendered
in Yelp.  Then screenshots would always look exactly like the rest
of the user's desktop.

OK, I'm going off the deep end.  All the same, this could be a
really fun project for somebody to work on.

--
Shaun