[plug] Vector Desktop (Display Manager)

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 09:17, Timothy White wrote:

> I know that Mac OS X has vector icons and many icon sets for KDE and 
> Gnome vector based. But what about the rest of the desktop? The display 
> manager? Most of it is just lines and fills so it could easily be vector 
> already but is it true vector? If it is true vector then theoretically I 
> could have a circular application or my menu could be elliptical.
> Does anyone know the current status of vector desktops and if/when they 
> are planned.

X11, in its current form, would make that somewhat challenging. What
would be required is some sort of layer to permit apps to work with a
vector-based drawing environment without caring that their output medium
was strictly bitmap. There is such a layer, Cairo, and it's beginning to
see some adoption now.

I think there's also some work going on in Keith Packhard's
freedesktop.org XServer to make GL/vector drawing fit more neatly into
the X11 model.

One issue with vector drawing onto a pixmap device is that a vector line
may be 1.5 pixels wide with a centre somewhere between two pixels.
Antialiasing this sort of thing will work, but give you a somewhat
blurry display. The application still needs to know enough about the
pixel-based output device to be able to provide drawing hints, much like
font hinting, for mapping its pure vector output (like a scalable font)
onto a pixel-based device. I think Cairo tackles this, but haven't
looked into how.

It's interesting, but I think we actually do pretty well with current
X11 as a fully functional raster drawing environment. It actually
understands and copes with screen dpi, for example, unlike every other
major OS (unless OS/X has finally got a handle on this).

--
Craig Ringer