[PD-dev] Re: pure devil (fwd)

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 10 Aug 2005, Georg Holzmann wrote:

> okay - I meant it much more simple ... (maybe layer is the wrong word
> for it ?) on a Qt Canvas you can give each item a property (I think an
> integer) if it is in front or in back - so e.g. if you want a red
> rectangle in front of a black rectangle ... (now you need to create the
> read rectangle after the black one ...)

The way it is in Tk is that every canvas-element is either at the front or
back or another one, such that if both are made to overlap, it is certain 
which one will be on the top of the other. I think that feature of Qt 
Canvas is equivalent to that one of the Tk Canvas.

I would like to make this more directly configurable by the user but I 
don't know of a good UI for doing this. jMax had "raise/lower" 
contextual-menu options but I never really knew what those were doing. 
Maybe I'm a detail-obsessed control-freak but when I raise an object I 
wonder up to which level it gets raised: on top of everything else in the 
patch? just on top of every object it was overlapping with ? How can I see 
that ordering ? (short of opening the .pd file in a text editor) And how 
can I set the ordering myself in an explicit way in a way not too hard to 
handle ?

Despite the plain raise/lower commands being less than ideal, I advocate 
adding them to Pd. It sure is better than the Cut+Paste hacks that we're 
forced to do to put the [cnv] objects under other objects.

BTW, did I say that I hate that [cnv] gets confused with the other canvas 
object, and how it gets used for purely æsthetical reasons? It should be 
called another name, like [dumb_rectangle], but it seems like it's too 
late.

____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada