Re: Gtk Extra widgets

[Al Hooton <al hootons org>]

On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 20:21 +0000, marcodev comcast net wrote:
> Richard,
>
> I found out shortly after posting my email that the widget HAS been ported to gtk2. I've been having some 
> issues with the font display but I'm trying to get help on it. You can find info on gtkextra from 
> sourceforge.net, that's where the repository is at. Also, gtkextra-2 is only available through cvs, I 
> couldn't find a tar file for it.

        I am currently developing an app using the gtkplotcanvas/gtkplot
systems in gtkextra-2.  This is the version that Adrian (the developer
of gtkextra) has been porting to GTK 2.x,.  It would appear the port is
very near to being done, although Adrian would have to comment on that
himself.  I'm not pushing on fonts or text display very hard, so I
probably can't help you on that front.  I know that everything has been
moved over to run on top of Pango fairly recently, so there may be some
outstanding issues in that area that I'm not aware of.

        Yes, gtkextra-2 is currently only available from CVS.  Be sure to join
the mailing list -- it's extremely low traffic, but usually some good
information.

        In general, I have been very happy with the system.  I have not probed
all parts of it yet as I am focused on using the canvas/plot
capabilities.  In these areas the widgets are doing a *lot* for me,
saving a large amount of time/coding, and giving me flexibility I was
not able to find in other canvas/plot solutions.  There were some memory
leaks early on, but Adrian was very good about working with me when I
sent in reports that narrowed down where I was losing memory.  The
canvas/plot stuff is now very stable for me and has a predictable ram
footprint.  My Valgrind tests now show I'm not losing memory in
gtkextra-2 when I beat on the canvas/plot stuff pretty hard (although
there are still leaks down in GTK/GDK, but that's a different email...).

        The current downside is the lack of documentation (as with many
open-source projects).  However, Adrian provides a lot of excellent
examples with gtkextra-2.  These examples are what I used to get a start
and understand how to structure an app using the gtkextra-2 widgets.
Also, there is a site on the web that documents Ada bindings to this
widget set that answered some questions for me:
http://libre.act-europe.fr/GtkAda/docs/gtkada_rm_toc.html.

        It's got some learning curve to it, but if you're looking for
canvas/plot functionality that you can't find elsewhere, this might be
what you need.

-Al

-- 


Al Hooton
al-at-hootons-dot-org

========
Maintainer of the linux-based open-source project Parapin.
http://www.sf.net/projects/parapin/
========