[compiz] Annotate, guiding line patches with questions

[Mike Dransfield]

David Reveman wrote:
>
> I see that you're using OpenGL geometry for drawing the guiding lines.
> That's good enough for now but eventually I think we want the guiding
> lines to match the final geometry rendered by cairo. This can easily be
> done using glitz.
>   

I havent seen much of glitz so far, it looks interesting.
I actually quite liked the basic rendering lines, they are
similar to how photoshop works/looks.

> I'm not sure. How advanced does the text need to be in the annotate
> plugin? If the toy text API in cairo is good enough, then using it to
> render text would be very easy.

I wasn't too worried about the actual rendering
I was thinking more about the user interface for
it and how the user would interact with it. If I
explain my eventual use for it then it might make
things clearer.

I would like to have a small app written in python/gtk
which would be triggered with a keystroke.  The user
would hit the keystroke and the application would be
launched by the annotate plugin.

It could then provide a basic palette and text entering
functions (copy/paste, selecting font, style, color).  When
it is activated it can  change the action for  annotate so
the modifiers are removed, the user can then annotate
whatever they like, without worrying about modifiers
etc (an arrow tool will be provided which can be used
to move/select windows).

When they are finished they can click a button which
would activate screenshot so that they can then take a
screenshot.

The screenshot plugin would then save the file and send
a signal through dbus to the helper app.  This can then
pick up the file and launch an email application or anything
else which can handle the image (instant messenger/web
forum etc etc).

The users will ask for these features, so I thought it was
probably best to relinquish a lot of power and code over to
a helper application early on.

We can avoid most direct entering problems by creating
a textbox tool which predefines the area, it would still
involve a lot of work with buffers to be able to delete,
copy/paste etc.  I assumed all of this would add to the
bloat more than anything, I could be wrong though.