Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 143.167.200.216]
on October 07, 2008 07:07 PM
Edje, KDE games and to some extent Plasma are completely different efforts to this. KDE games use hand-crafted SVGs for each game. Forcing artists to draw every application in order to make a theme would be bad news. The way those games work is nice, but doesn't scale.
Edje is a kind of user interface description, which tells a toolkit like ETK or QT what to draw ("put a button here", "move this image over there").
Plasma allows SVG theming, but is essentially a new toolkit (based on QT's canvas). This means that to take advantage of SVG theming you'd need to completely rewrite your application to use Plasma.
What Manju is trying to do is make a generalisation of the things provided by GTK+, QT, etc. and then standardise an unambiguous naming system and things for them. Then, using this naming scheme, SVG files can be created with the graphics objects given those names (so I can draw a button and call it "button", for example). Finally, these SVGs can be translated automatically into GTK+, QT or whatever, using scripts. In my example the script would look through my SVG for something named "button", then it would turn this into a bitmap graphic (rather than a vector) and give it to GTK+ (probably using a theme engine like Pixbuf) which draws it in place of the buttons. QT would do the same, as would anything else given support for this system.
This abstraction away from the toolkit and translation back means that it can be made more comfortable to make themes, and that those themes can be applied in many toolkits instead of being tied to one.
I'm looking forward to seeing what is possible with this. Hopefully it won't slow things down too much if it catches on.
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New Manju project plans to redraw desktop art
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 143.167.200.216] on October 07, 2008 07:07 PMEdje is a kind of user interface description, which tells a toolkit like ETK or QT what to draw ("put a button here", "move this image over there").
Plasma allows SVG theming, but is essentially a new toolkit (based on QT's canvas). This means that to take advantage of SVG theming you'd need to completely rewrite your application to use Plasma.
What Manju is trying to do is make a generalisation of the things provided by GTK+, QT, etc. and then standardise an unambiguous naming system and things for them. Then, using this naming scheme, SVG files can be created with the graphics objects given those names (so I can draw a button and call it "button", for example). Finally, these SVGs can be translated automatically into GTK+, QT or whatever, using scripts. In my example the script would look through my SVG for something named "button", then it would turn this into a bitmap graphic (rather than a vector) and give it to GTK+ (probably using a theme engine like Pixbuf) which draws it in place of the buttons. QT would do the same, as would anything else given support for this system.
This abstraction away from the toolkit and translation back means that it can be made more comfortable to make themes, and that those themes can be applied in many toolkits instead of being tied to one.
I'm looking forward to seeing what is possible with this. Hopefully it won't slow things down too much if it catches on.
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