On Sun, 2006-03-05 at 17:14 -0800, Andy T. Beckenbach wrote: > Hi all, > > In order to make the transition from Windows to Linux, I have > to port one of my most important tools, a molecular sequence editor > (DNA, RNA, and amino acid) that I have been developing and using > for the past decade. ah reminds me of the bad old days at EMBL in the mid 80's ;) > So my question is straight-forward: What is the best way to > display a single character in a specified font (mono-spaced in my > application, since text columns have to align vertically), in a > specified color (since each residue will have an associated color), > at a specfic position withing an editing window? given a drawing area widget, or any widget that has its own window, you would use gdk_draw_layout (drawing_area->get_window(), .....) to create the layout, PangoLayout* layout = gtk_widget_create_layout (drawing_area); pango_layout_set_text ("a"); GTK1 provided gdk_draw_text(), but this has been removed (effectively) because "text" doesn't provide enough representational power for text in a multi-lingual, bidirectional world. now, alas, pango is pretty heavyweight for drawing single characters precisely because it does provide a lot of representational power. so if you find that this isn't fast enough, you have a way out: you can draw the chars into pixmaps, and then use gdk_draw_drawable() to render the pixmaps, which will avoid some pango computation. i would try the straight layout version first though - there is every change it will work. finally, if you're really new at this, a reminder: * do not draw into an on-screen drawable (like your drawing area) in anything other than an expose event handler * if something happens that requires a change in the appearance, call gtk_widget_queue_draw() sorry if i get any function names wrong,i use gtkmm (C++) not straight gtk (C) --p _______________________________________________ gtk-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-list