Re: Balloon-help or callout window

["Freddie Unpenstein" <fredderic excite com>]

> > I agree about the shaped windws. The actual window is square. The
> > only non-square bit is he pointer, and that seems to be the
> > tricky bit.
> As long as your line is straight you can use shaped windows with
> a minimal performance hit (just two boxes above and below the
> line). Since shaped windows are defined by boxes having anything
> other than a straight line would be prohibited.  Why not just
> extend tool-tips to have multiple lines?

What version of GTK+ are you using that doesn't allow multi-line tooltips?  I never used GTK+ 1.2 tooltips, 
but the 2.4 version just uses Pango layouts.  In fact a quick hack to detect a <markup> at the start, and 
call the *_with_markup function, and it even supports marked up text.

I do rather like this idea.  A persistant tooltip that appears off to one side, with lines that connect it to 
each widget as you move the mouse around, or something...  Would be a wonderful use for the other piece of 
tooltip text that can be set on widgets, which doesn't appear to actually be used by anything.  Perhaps a 
derivative of tooltips might be handy, though I'm not sure how much of the code would be reusable.  It 
doesn't seem to be highly dynamic.

Where a diagonal line isn't possible, you could simply slide the window up and down as required.  In fact, it 
may even be easier to use two popup windows.  One for the persistant "bubble text" tooltip, and a 1-pixel 
high window for the line, which you stretch and shorten as needed.


Fredderic

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