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