State of the art of partial transparency?

Sorry if this is a FAQ, but I can't seem to find it answered anywhere
in the past 8 years. What's the state of the art with regard to
partial, per-pixel transparent windows under X (x.org, I suppose)? I'm
a bit out of the loop on X, but from what I know of RENDER, COMPOSITE,
and that batch of extensions, I don't think they allow it; my
impression is that they make per-window alpha blending possible only.

If this is in fact possible, a pointer to what extension/API to use
would be most welcome, even if it's gnome/kde specific (though that's
not preferred, of course).

Thanks!

Damian

On Apr 11, 5:53 pm, Damian Frank <damian.fr...@gmail.com> wrote:[color=blue]
> Sorry if this is a FAQ, but I can't seem to find it answered anywhere
> in the past 8 years. What's the state of the art with regard to
> partial, per-pixel transparent windows under X (x.org, I suppose)? I'm
> a bit out of the loop on X, but from what I know of RENDER, COMPOSITE,
> and that batch of extensions, I don't think they allow it; my
> impression is that they make per-window alpha blending possible only.
>
> If this is in fact possible, a pointer to what extension/API to use
> would be most welcome, even if it's gnome/kde specific (though that's
> not preferred, of course).
>
> Thanks!
>
> Damian[/color]

On Apr 11, 5:53 pm, Damian Frank <damian.fr...@gmail.com> wrote:[color=blue]
> Sorry if this is a FAQ, but I can't seem to find it answered anywhere
> in the past 8 years. What's the state of the art with regard to
> partial, per-pixel transparent windows under X (x.org, I suppose)? I'm
> a bit out of the loop on X, but from what I know of RENDER, COMPOSITE,
> and that batch of extensions, I don't think they allow it; my
> impression is that they make per-window alpha blending possible only.[/color]

COMPOSITE "causes a entire sub-tree of the window hierarchy to be
rendered to an off-screen buffer.", according to
[url]http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/CompositeExt[/url]

You can then splat it on screen using whatever technique you want.

-Ed
--
(You can't go wrong with psycho-rats.)([url]http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~er258[/url])

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