Re: [gtk-list] GTK text widget (was Re: Proposal for a new project)

[Shawn T Amundson <amundson cs umn edu>]

Words Of Josh MacDonald:
>
>With all this talk of KDE and HTML and all sorts of other people starting
>to really use GTK, it strikes me that someday, someone is going to notice
>that the text widget doesn't really work.  I suppose I'll be having time
>to finish it after finals, but have no immediate motivation because I have
>no application demanding its completion.  Further, I realized that while
>most of the technical details are mostly complete, I have no experience
>actually connecting a text widget up to anything non-trivial, and therefore
>the API is currently almost non-existent.

I'm glad I haven't tried to use it yet; Aorta will need it, and will
be a big enough app to test it out properly, I'm certain.  

I figure a cheap little calendar program that lets you type in stuff 
for each day and changes the color dependant on if it's got something 
for that day would be a good demo.  I don't know if that would constitute
a motivational force or not. ;-)

>
>It seems to me, that an HTML widget isn't really much different from a
>text widget, considering that the GTK text widget, in its current state,
>supports variable width fonts.  I suspect that any HTML widget is going to
>duplicate a lot of code.  It would seem to me that adding the ability to
>do various justifications and centering, and treating things like images
>and tables as things with a unique, specially sized font, gets you almost
>all the way there (neglecting the boring part about parsing HTML).

Which kind of gets back to my question about making it possible to insert
any old child widget into the text widget: wouldn't that be cool?

>I'm wondering if people have given this any thought to this or could 
>recommend the appropriate path to completing the text widget and/or any of 
>your other wild desires.  At the bare minimum, does anyone have suggestions 
>for what the rest of the text widget API should look like?

I've only mildly looked at the text widget, but I'll try and get some
ideas as I work on that demo.

--
Shawn T. Amundson		University of Minnesota
Systems Administration	 	Computer Science System Staff
amundson@cs.umn.edu	  	http://www.cs.umn.edu/~amundson/     	

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