Re: cairo drawing commands to gdk_invalidate_region

[Dov Grobgeld <dov grobgeld gmail com>]

The problem of deciding what areas to expose are imho opinion too hard for the motion handler to deal with. E.g. if the rubberband is e.g. of an ellipse outline then you need quite a bit of mathematics to figure out what areas to expose. You can of course expose the entire bounding box, but that is very expensive for a large areas if it needs to be done several times a second. The idea of painting a low res mask takes care of it.

Regarding the draw() routine, as you can see in the actual code, I do pass a boolean flag that indicates whether it is the low res mask that should be drawn or the actual drawing. This can be used to avoid drawing gradients and other expensive drawing operations during mask creation.

In any case, thanks for your input.

Dov

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 14:47, Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com> wrote:

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Dov Grobgeld <dov grobgeld gmail com> wrote:

> The solution won't work if the default expose-event handler returns TRUE.
> I would still like to resolve the issues that Paul has with my description
> of the code. Paul, why don't you like the fact that I call draw() twice?

that's overstating it a little bit. what i was taking issue with is
that *unless* draw() has some way to be able to tell that it is being
called from an expose event handler (and that would presumably have to
be some global variable, since nothing is passed to it as an
argument), it is by definition doing the wrong thing *if* it is
responsible for all the rendering that occurs in the expose handler.
why? because that would imply that it actually renders in both the
pre-expose call and the expose-event call, but you should only be
rendering (to the window at list) in the expose event call.

you asked:  How is update() supposed to know what region to invalidate?

in your original description, you showed the flow as:

   # motion event calls update()

   # update() calls draw() in order to get regions to expose.

   # update() calls gdk_invalidate_region() based on output from draw

   # exposure-event callback calls draw() to carry out the drawing
for each region

so you have logic that knows what regions are affected by the motion
event (the above description makes it sound as if that logic is inside
draw()). update should have that logic so that it can call
gdk_invalidate_region(), and then the expose-event call to draw()
should use the event region list to redraw.

if your code works, that's fine. i'm just trying to describe to you
what i *think* is the right way to do this so that its portable to all
backends of GTK and is following the overall drawing model embedded in
GTK.

--p