On 17 Apr 2004, at 21:33, Andreas Raab wrote:

> Bah... why bother? Wanna know how I think about this? Display should 
> really
> be an alias to whatever the host "display system" represents, (for 
> example
> the X-server on Linux) and when you draw to display you get something
> looking like here:
>
> http://www.impara.de/~andreas/sample.png
>
> *Then* you create a window on that display and associate whatever kind 
> of
> drawing surface you want with it (or use the native graphics 
> interface).
> What you need to do this is a pretty small interface across the 
> platforms
> with the only "fast path" being the ability to throw bits to the 
> display
> surface (e.g., what we do today already).

Well, what would be really nice is to have this at the Canvas level.  
Way back when I added Postscript output, I couldn't resist creating a 
variant of the PostscriptCanvas that drew to the screen via DPS.  It 
was beautiful, if a bit slow at that early stage.  The only thing that 
was really problematic was Text, because Canvas actually falls back on 
BitBlt to draw text.  I eventually did get it to draw using platform 
fonts, but that didn't match the expected metrics and therefore 
selection and the cursor were off.

Marcel