[openbox] Images in the menu

[Corey Wright]

On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 17:15:38 +0200
Holly Bostick <motub at planet.nl> wrote:

> OK, now I am not a programmer, and I don't know anything about this,
> so that may be the source of my confusion.
> 
> However.
> 
> I *have* icons. I have Gnome installed, I have kdelibs installed, the 
> applications I use install icons for themselves.
> 
> So why would there be additional dependencies needed to enable Openbox
> 
> menus to use the icons I already have? The idea being that if I
> already have the icons, and can use them in other WMs (and, as you
> say, in OB windows), don't I already have whatever dependencies would
> be needed to make them viewable in OB menus (if OB was able to
> recognize an icon= setting in the menu.xml)?

here's an analogy (though probably a poor one, especially considering i
don't know the minutia of the x protocol):

getting the icon from the application's window is like having the icon
verbally communicated to you.

getting the icon from a file on the filesystem (as instructed by
menu.rc) is like reading the icon.

just because somebody can verbally communicate the icon to you doesn't
mean you can read the icon.  just because you can read the icon doesn't
mean you can also understand someone verbalizing it to you.  just
because someone can speak and hear a language, doesn't mean they can
read it.

and just as though my next door neighbor (gnome, kde) can listen and
read icons, doesn't mean that i can.

the current code could probably be used for displaying the icon, but
first getting the icon (reading it from the filesystem based on menu.rc)
is the missing functionality.  it would be easiest if the icon was
stored on the filesystem as an xpm (that's an image format) as i think
that's the format x-windows uses for communicating window icons (but
that's only a guess).  but even the easiest solution still requires some
coding, something nobody has not done.  but really, now days everybody
uses png which requires libpng (a library for using the png format), and
people would probably want dynamically sized icons (so that the icons
would change size based on font size of the menu text), and a whole host
of other features that nobody has cared enough about in openbox to write
the code (or motivate someone else to do it; pay, barter, flatter, etc).

the currently implemented solution for displaying window icons was
probably simple and straightforward (kiss: keep it simple, stupid) and
that's why it got implemented.

> I'm not trying to be a bitch, I'm just asking, otherwise I'll never 
> learn ;-) .

i answered this post because of your desire to learn and i respect that.
 hopefully my post was helpful and someone else will follow up to clear
up the details that i probably got terribly wrong.

corey
-- 
undefined at pobox.com