On Tue, 12 Feb 2002 02:07:34 +0100, Cristalle Azundris Sabon said:
Since we -- urks. I just noticed that sentence left off in the
middle. It was supposed to read something like:
"Personally, I've found that moving the scrollbars outwards till
they touch the borders (provided by the window manager), leaving
no padding between those borders and the scrollbars, is almost
necessary for the transparency to look like people would expect
it to."
Ahh..now that it's all there, it makes sense even without the image. ;)
The problem is, of course, that if there's "padding" between the scrollbar
and the window manager borders, the eye tends to think of the scrollbar
as "floating" on top of the background, and it doesn't look right unless
the padding looks consistent with that interpretation (i.e., if there's
a pattern on the background, you expect to see the appropriate pixels
in the padding.
For even more fun, try it with a window manager that has a "detached"
border that "floats" a few pixels away from the window. This tends to
make a pseudo-transparent window look worse, because it accentuates what
a "real" transparency would show (usually, 'transparent' windows will
merely composite themselves onto a copy of the root window, rather than
actually implement window stacking. So if your window manager border
is making it even MORE obvious that another window is "under" you,
the application window "transparency" looks worse..
See this for an example:
http://www.xwinman.org/screenshots/wm2-default.gif
The only way you can do this "right" is with something like the XRender
extension (but even then, you need some cooperation....)
> What about proportional-spaced fonts?
I guess I'll leave that one for my elders and betters to answer. : )
I'd think it'd still work with nominal (or average) cells.
Actually, the proper hack until we know how to do it *right* would be to
nail that scrollbar to the side, over-riding whatever padding might be there.
/Valdis