Re: Compositing with GDK/GTK

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Sun, 2008-05-04 at 19:41 -0400, Donny Viszneki wrote:
> I'm worried that all the "canvas" offerings do not provide extensible
> drawable classes, as GDK seems to have built-in support for, but as I
> said, I can't find any documentation for this :(

I think you're misunderstanding.

Each canvas comes with a set of "items" pre-defined. These generally all
inherit from some prototypical canvas item, which includes a "virtual
method" for painting the item onto the canvas. Each specific concrete
instance of a canvas item type has its own painting method. If the
builtin canvas items don't do what you want, you implement a new one. In
general, this is really pretty easy to do (its slightly easier in C++,
but even in C, its not hard).

In terms of raw drawing APIs, all the newer canvases support Cairo,
which is about as nice a drawing API as you could expect to find
anywhere, and is actually very similar to both PostScript and Apple's
Quartz drawing kit.

--p