Re: Drawing lines in Swarm Display

[Nelson Minar]

>Just to add a little more nuisance to the mix.... It would be nice to
>have lines -with width-.

I feel your pain, Ginger. And everyone else who wants fancy graphics.

The problem is that Swarm doesn't want to be a full graphics drawing
library. At least, it didn't when I was writing Raster. Doing graphics
right is actually quite difficult - check out the Java2D spec sometime.
That's why Raster's drawing capabilities were limited to just drawing
individual pixels; it didn't do much, but at least it did that right.

But for people's work they need more capability - lines, circles, real
drawing tools. I don't think extending Raster is the right way to do
that. In particular, the semantics don't make a lot of sense in the
ZoomRaster - should the circles and fonts be scaled too?

I think the right thing for this in Swarm today is to use the Canvas
widget. My impression is not many people use it; does anyone know why?
Does it seem too complicated, or are there not enough examples, or..?

>Java doesn't provide lines with width

This will be fixed in Java 1.2 as part of Swing and Java2d. I've got
some quick hack code to do something about it now; if you want it for
Java send me email, or check out my graphic design stuff at
  http://nelson.www.media.mit.edu/people/nelson/research/mas964/

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