ANNOUNCE - graphics package

[Joe Armstrong]

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Mikael Karlsson wrote:

> Oh yes!
> could I add some support for PDF like primitives to the wishlist, so
> one could have an ErlGuten like interface. 
> See: http://www.cairographics.org/


This is the plan ...

The next goal is to get support for anti-alised fonts and alpha blending
+ to get the kind of TCL/TK usability.

IMHO the ex11 graphics stuff is *much* easier to program than TCL since
you can *directly* hit the X protocol level.

In TCL/TK you have to *change languages* to do real tricky stuff
(ie you can no longer program in TCL to do tricky things but have to change to
C)


If you want to do tricky things in ex11 you can *stay* in Erlang - since
All levels can direcly communicate with the X server socket.


> There are actually two X11 libraries under jungerl:
> ex11 and x11,  is  "ex11" the one to choose?

Neither - the ex11 on http://www.sics.se/~joe/ex11 is derived from
the Jungerl but has now been significantly changed. 

/Joe


> 
> Regards Mikael.
> 
> måndag 12 januari 2004 15:26 skrev Joe Armstrong:
> > On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Vlad Dumitrescu wrote:
> > > >   I will support the widget infrastructure and the low level X library.
> > >
> > > It's quite soon to ask this, but I wonder: do your plans include adding
> > > functionality for X extensions? From what I saw in the code, it's not so
> > > easy to extend in a modular way, but I may be jumping to conclusions.
> > >
> > > What I had in mind was the Render extension, and also support for Xft.
> > > This goes a bit beyond "Erlang only talks to X server", but I guess you
> > > would be also interested in high quality output, TrueType fonts,
> > > antialiasing, transparency and so on ;-)
> >
> > Yes indeed - but this is running before we can walk - text widgets
> > for variable width fonts etc is not entirely trivial.
> >
> >   I'm beginnging  to wonder about extension  this - now do  I do alpha
> > blending for example??
> >
> > /Joe
> >
> > > regards,
> > > Vlad
> 
>