dflplot/Plot2Kill, Most Mature *nix GUI For D2

[Johannes Pfau]

On 16.07.2010 15:34, dsimcha wrote:
> == Quote from Lars T. Kyllingstad (public at kyllingen.NOSPAMnet)'s article
>> On Fri, 16 Jul 2010 02:41:01 +0000, dsimcha wrote:
>>> I've refactored my dflplot lib to the point where the GUI-specific stuff
>>> is well abstracted from the GUI-agnostic stuff in preparation for a port
>>> to a GUI lib that supports rotated fonts, saving bitmaps, and/or *nix.
>>> The plan is to support multiple GUI libs, including DFL (already working
>>> except for rotated fonts and saving) and at least one or two more.
>>>
>>> I started trying to do a port to gtkD, but found the API to be
>>> intolerable in that it's poorly documented and requires you to use the
>>> low-level C APIs (read:  raw pointers and
>>> functions_named_like_this_to_prevent_naming_collisions()) for basic
>>> stuff like constructing a drawing context.
>> Are you sure?  I admit, I have only played around with it, and never
>> actually used it for serious work, but I never ran across any C-style
>> interfaces while doing so.
>> gtkD seems to be modeled on GTK++, and its documentation comments seem to
>> be copied verbatim from the GTK++ docs.  So if you're looking for very
>> basic documentation (i.e. what does what?), this could be a good starting
>> point:
>>   http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/stable/
>> That said, could this be what you need?
>>   http://www.dsource.org/projects/gtkd/browser/trunk/src/gtk/DrawingArea.d
>>> [...]
>>>
> 
> What turned me off was the Drawable class, which I'd be using heavily.  There's no
> way to construct it w/o explicitly creating a pointer to a C struct and then
> passing it in.  See
> 
> http://www.dsource.org/projects/gtkd/browser/trunk/src/gdk/Drawable.d
> 
> Also, only the SVN version compiles on 2.047, not any releases.  Again, I'm not
> knocking gtkD's long-term viability.  I'm just saying it needs more time to mature.
> 
> On the other hand, the more you encourage me to look at it, the more I think that
> the omission of any "real" c'tor for Drawable is a single oversight rather than a
> general trend.  Initially I had decided that I was simply unwilling to mess w/ any
> crufty C APIs to create this plotting library, but if I have to do it in one small
> place to work around this omission, then I'll do it.

That's a general problem with the gtk api, it's not directly related to
GTKd. (gtk generally sucks at custom drawing, see
http://federkiel.wordpress.com/2008/03/12/gtk-30-getting-serious/ about
canvas for example)

You need to do the following to draw to a Widget:
1. Create a drawing area Widget
(http://gtkd.mikewey.eu/src/gtk/DrawingArea.html)
2. Get the DrawingAreas window using DrawingArea.getWindow()
3. A Window is a subclass of Drawable. So you can draw to that window.

In the best case you'd encapsulate all that in a subclass of
DrawingArea. But I'm not sure if that works with gtkd.
-- 
Johannes Pfau