On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 20:40 -0800, Chris MacGregor wrote: > So I would think it appropriate that it (GDK, I guess) provide (instead of or > in addition to those functions) functions that return the *available* screen > size after deducting whatever the underlying window system is providing that > semi-permanently occupies screen real estate, such as panels/taskbars/etc. It > doesn't really make sense to me that the answer is "no, portable GTK-based > apps must (unportably!!) go around the portability library layers and talk > directly to the underlying window system to try to figure that out". This is the direct opposite of what I was saying. Or almost the opposite. My point is that GDK & GTK can tell you (easily) about what the backend window system will allow/can do etc etc. You want the screen width? Not a problem. However, GDK & GTK are not desktop systems themselves. So they have a much harder time (maybe an impossible time) telling you what the desktop system that the user has in front of them has done with all that (physical) screen real estate. Has the desktop put a panel at the bottom of the screen? Is it set to "autohide" ? Is there some kind of "top menu bar" visible all the time? GTK doesn't know the answers to these questions. It *could* contain code to discover it, but AFAICT, that code should be a higher-level library than GTK, which is why I mentioned GNOME. Problem is, even then its not exactly standard. Your GTK app could run on a KDE desktop that behaves entirely differently to a GNOME desktop. AFAIK, Freedesktop.org has not yet provided any APIs to generically check with the desktop system and find out the answers that you are seeking. I am not even sure that they ever will. Note that although its an edge case, there are also regular window managers for plain old X11 that use a tiled window policy. Your computation of "how much screen real estate is available" will almost certainly break on such systems. I know these are rare these days, but I just wanted to mention it to show that its not just caused by cross-platform issues. --p _______________________________________________ gtk-list mailing list gtk-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-list
