[Splashy-devel] Bug#476697: separate print and scroll textboxes, and some details (scrolling, line spacing, alpha-channel, dialog-config, vt-is-UTF8-bugreport)

[debian at x.ray.net]

package: splashy
version: 0.3.8-1
severity: wishlist

maybe i got something totally wrong and "just didn't get it [tm]" - in this case i'm hoping for kind directions from somebody more enlightened than me... :)

but:

splashy_update print
	opens textbox. prints a line of text to the defined textbox. clears everything that was in it before.

splashy_update scroll
	does not open textbox. if textbox is already there, prints a line of text to the defined textbox. doesn't clear previous text but scrolls.

pressing F2 opens textbox (an empty one).

so print, scroll, and F2 all influence one another.

now to me it seems it would make most sense if the 'print' textbox and the 'scroll' textbox were two independent objects. i.e. two objects to be configured in the .xml file. at the same time, the 'scroll' textbox having some sort of persistency - whether it's currently visible or not - would be nice. i.e. pressing F2, the 'scroll' textbox is displayed with the same content as if it had always been visible.
this again makes me wonder whether it might be possible to have a vt's stdout duplicated to simply feed it to splashy's stdin and to have splashy use this as input for the 'scroll' textbox (at least as an option).

to illustrate this, what i have in mind is something like this:

<progressbar>
    <dimension>
        <x>0</x>
        <y>97</y>
        <width>100</width>
        <height>3</height>
    </dimension>
</progressbar>
<printtextbox>
    <dimension>
        <x>0</x>
        <y>97</y>
        <width>100</width>
        <height>3</height>
    </dimension>
</printtextbox>
<scrolltextbox>
    <dimension>
        <x>10</x>
        <y>10</y>
        <width>80</width>
        <height>80</height>
    </dimension>
</scrolltextbox>

in the initramfs-tools 'functions' script, 'log_begin_msg' could 'splashy_update "print $@"'. if the vt-stdout-duplication-to-splashy-stdin-used-as-scrolltextbox-input mentioned above is not possible, '_log_msg' could additionally 'splashy_update "scroll $@"'.

i.e. you could have a progressbar (e.g. at the bottom) displaying the current action in/above it (printtextbox). by pressing f2, you could switch the multiline/scroll textbox (e.g. the usual plain textmode vt output) on and off.

not directly connected to the above, some other things i noted:

scrolling currently clears the textbox and starts from top. scrolling every line one line up would be much nicer, ofc. :)

configurable line spacing would be nice. maybe also with a configurable padding from the textbox' border.

when i configure a textbox using an alpha-channel value, this seems to reduce the color-resolution inside the textbox (at least that's how it looks). i.e. i have a 24bit-color image, and a textbox with color #ffffff with alpha 68, the image in the area of the textbox looks like it just had 16bit-color resolution or less...

it looks like both the progressbar's fore- and background colors' alpha values don't actually work?

i believe that's on your todo already: the dialog should be configurable :)

if i understood this correctly, there has not been a bug report for the vt-is-UTF8 behavior of console-tools? i guess vt-is-UTF8 waiting for input is under any circumstance just wrong, is there anything i don't see that makes reporting this bug not reasonable?

regards,

	Chris