[Iup-users] Suggestions (was: IUP compile error)

[Otfried Cheong]

Antonio Scuri wrote:
>  Yes, that makefile is incorrect. I already fixed it in CVS. In a few week I
> will release the 2.6 final.
> 
>  The GTK driver will be available soon. I've been working on IUP 3 for a
> while now and I guess in November I will have a beta.

That is great news.  And then maybe this is the right time to make some 
comments/requests:

(1) I'm using Cairo (www.cairographics.org) to draw into my 
applications.  This works very well, and I'm quite happy with the 
combination of IUP and Cairo - but I needed a little hack which could be 
fixed in IUP.

I have an IupCanvas widget.  In the redraw callback, I do this:

int repaint_cb(Ihandle *self, float x, float y)
{
#ifdef WIN32
   HDC *hdc = (HDC *) IupGetAttribute(ih, "HDC_WMPAINT");
   cairo_surface_t *surface = cairo_win32_surface_create(*hdc);
#else
   Widget wid = (Widget) IupGetAttribute(ih, "WID");
   cairo_surface_t *surface = cairo_xlib_surface_create(XtDisplay(wid),
                              XtWindow(wid), iupmot_visual, w, h);
#endif
   cairo_t *cc = cairo_create(surface);
   // draw using cairo
   cairo_destroy(cc);
   cairo_surface_destroy(surface);
}

As you can see, everything is fine under Windows.  Under X11, though, I 
need pointers to the X display, the window, and the visual.  IUP exposes 
the window and the display, but doesn't seem to expose the visual (I 
only got this to work by having a declaration "extern Visual 
*iupmot_visual;" in my code, but this should really be exposed as a 
global attribute).

(2) There is something strange about IupUpdate in the Motif driver. 
This function is actually empty in the driver (at the end of "motif.c").
When the data in my program has changed, I call IupUpdate on the 
IupCanvas, and I was wondering why nothing happened.

(3) IUP consists of some 'core' controls in the libiup library, and some 
'extra' controls in the libiupcontrols library.  It seems that the 
separation has been made between controls that are entirely mapped to 
native controls and those that haven't.

I think this is not the best possible separation.  In my case, for 
instance, I do not want to use libiupcontrols because it requires me to 
link in libcd as well, nearly doubling the size of my application.  It 
would be nice if I could still use IupCBox and IupSBox (I looked at the 
code, and it does not seem to make any use of CD at all, so I believe 
these controls could easily be moved to libiup).

Would it perhaps be an idea to put those controls that do not need libcd 
into libiup?

Best wishes,
  Otfried