[Glade-devel] Background Image ...

[damon at karuna.uklinux.net (Damon Chaplin)]

On Sun, 2006-04-23 at 09:34 -0500, Juan Carlos Orozco wrote:

> Thanks Damon, that does help. I may be pushing my luck here, but the
> only problem remaining is that after placing the Image widget that is
> used as background, one needs to place the other widgets outside the
> Image area and then drag them into their final position over the
> background Image area. It is not possible to place the other widgets
> over the background Image area directly.

Yes, I'm afraid GTK+ widgets aren't really intended to be stacked on top
of each other.

You might be able to use an rc file to set the background pixmap of the
layout/window instead of using an image widget. Though I'm not sure how
well that would work.


> I can imagine other interesting combinations of images and control
> widgets that could find this feature (placing widgets over an Image
> widget) also useful. Think of an audio application that presents itself
> as a car stereo image with control widgets over it. This is becoming a
> common way of GUI in modern systems. Of course we also need things like
> images with transparency for the control widgets like buttons, text
> entry, etc. This last part may be more related to GTK than Glade. BTW
> the label widget does have a transparent background and it can be used
> as a button but without "pressed" feedback or we could use images for
> the buttons that blend with the background, this is just more work but
> it looks the same.

I think your best option is probably to write your own simple GUI
editing app, and use your own button widget that has transparency.
But you'd need to know GTK+ fairly well to be able to do that.

(I'm starting to think we need a new set of cairo-based widgets for GTK+
that support things like transparency & transformations.)

Damon