Re: Best tool? gdkpixbuf?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Chris Evans <chris@ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk> writes:
> Previously, I wrote all these by hand. But I'm guessing there will be
> GNOME API's to handle this? gnome-canvas? gdk-pixbuf? Are they fast?
> 

The canvas is good but as always you pay for abstraction with some
speed penalty. To get maximum speed you probably want OpenGL with
GtkGLArea. To get maximum convenience the GnomeCanvas. Somewhere in
between, use a drawing area (read the "scribble" example in the GTK
tutorial and the GDK chapter of my book).

The only way to know what's "fast enough" for your application is to
do some experimentation.

Note that the canvas really has two very different modes, GDK mode and
antialiased mode. AA mode is higher-quality and has full alpha
blending, and is usually slower than GDK mode but could be faster for
some applications.

Havoc