Re: translucent widgets

[Andreas Volz <andreas brachttal net>]

Am 16 Jun 2003 04:58:23 -0000 schrieb akshay  kumar:

> HI,
> I searched the api's of GDK and GTK both , but couldnt locate any
> functionality which wud enable me to set the alpha channel for the
> background of a given widget, actually i wud like my whole application
> to be translucent (once that is done i may implement a slider to
> control the opacity ). i looked at the GDKColor, it doesnt have any
> field for alpha channel,all i cud find was r,g,b, the
> GtkColorSelection has 'get' and 'set' alpha functions,  from that i
> thought that somewhere in gtk setting of alpha must be supported. or
> is it there just for the future implementation of alpha channel in
> GDK.
>
> if not in gtk ,is translucency effect supported in some other GUI
> toolkit for linux,( like Qt) ??

Hi,

I don't think that this is possible in plain GDK. Correct my if I'm
wrong.

But you could use the shape extension of X. Perhaps this fits for you.
I've also seen some XRender-Examples somewhere, perhaps this is also
possible with GDK?

Perhaps it's an idea to make a "screenshot" and copy it to the
background of your application. But I think this is very slow like a
gnome-terminal or something else.

At least there is XDirectFB¹. You could make a whole window real
transparent, but there are (at the moment) no ability to translulence
only parts of you application. Ask on the mailinglist of DiretFB for
further questions.

bye
Andreas

[1] http://www.directfb.org