On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 5:34 PM, Alan W. Irwin <ir...@beluga.phys.uvic.ca> wrote: > On 2010-03-18 16:26-0400 Hezekiah M. Carty wrote: > >> >> [...] From what I have read so >> far, having nicely window-manager independent transparent backgrounds >> for the xcairo (and xwin and possiblt qtwidget) devices would require >> pulling in more X dependencies and would only work with window >> managers which support such niceties. > > I read some stuff like that as well on the web, but I think it must be quite > dated information. To show this, note that the ImageMagick "display" > application is a GUI that ultimately interacts with the X server on Linux. > > Now that -dev pngcairo is working properly, you can test whether your X > server renders transparent backgrounds by running > > examples/c/x02c -dev pngcairo -bg 0000ff_0.3 -fam -o test.png > > followed by > > display -immutable test.png.2 > > In my case I have access to two different X servers for two very different > boxes. I use the Debian Lenny X server/kernel 2.6.26 for my newish Intel > box with g33 chipset/gma 3100 and the Debian Testing X server/kernel 2.6.32 > with my old shuttle box (the X-terminal) with embedded SiS hardware with > reverse-engineered 2D X driver. In both cases, I get transparent results > with "display -immutable". David had similar success with display > -immutable, although in his case display might be interacting with something > different than X (glitz?), but at minimum his result showed that transparent > backgrounds can be properly rendered on Mac OS X. > > [out of order] > Should I back-out the xcairo device change [to insert an obscuring layer > between pages]? > > Yes, please. Of course, you first have to figure out a way to not stack > xcairo pages on top of previous pages. I was thinking along the lines that > when a page was started the widget/GUI associated with the previous page > should be properly terminated and a whole new widget/GUI initialized for the > new page. But maybe you would not have to go to that extreme... >
I think we may be talking about two different kinds of transparency here, or I am using a differently configured version of imagemagick (6.5.1.0-1.1ubuntu3). Do you mean transparent backgrounds as in (a)"I can watch a movie in the window under my translucent plot!" or (b)"I see a checkerboard pattern through my plot, but not the windows underneath it"? In the case of (a), which some applications support (for example, recent versions of the Gnome terminal support this), the xcairo device would have to pull in some extra outside support from X libraries. For (b), no special X support is required, we would just have to change the xcairo device to draw some sort of checkboard pattern at the start of each plot page, like Gnome's eog or imagemagick's display does when displaying an image with a transparent background. For (b), the only change from the current situation is that the user would get a checkboard pattern under their plot rather than a plain white background. Hez ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
