C.Reinke wrote:
* oh, and why is the default stroke font size so huge? I have * to scale it down by a factor of 100, it seems, to get into * natural proportions..
Well, I guess the size itself is not a bug, but a feature of GLUT. But there is an inconsistency: The spec for glutStrokeCharacter http://www.opengl.org/developers/documentation/glut/spec3/node78.html talks about "units" (of magnitude 100, as you've already noticed), while the spec for glutStrokeWidth http://www.opengl.org/developers/documentation/glut/spec3/node79.html talks about "pixels". The latter is probably a cut-n-paste bug from the spec for glutBitmapWidth.
[...] Binding to one of those would be of general interest (just as fonts..) and might make the file manager problem easier:
http://www.sjbaker.org/steve/omniv/mui_pui_glui.html http://www.cs.unc.edu/~rademach/glui/
The latter is already on my (rather long :-} TODO list, but things are complicated by the fact that no Linux distribution or any other OS I know of comes with a pre-installed GLUI. Requiring a potential UI programmer to download and install it first would vastly lower the acceptance of the binding. Consequently the way to go is to ship the Haskell binding with the library itself. This is not such a big deal as it might sound, the object files on Linux are about 260kB, i.e. almost nothing compared to the probable size of the Haskell part.
[...] If we believe the marketing hype, ghc-5.04.1 will have what it takes,
The just released GHC 5.04 has spec-conforming FFI support, as does the CVS version of Hugs. NHC98 almost has it IIRC, but I'm not sure about this. Simply ask Malcolm about this.
and the FFI spec is stable (they say..).
Apart from some esoteric features and occasional clarifications the spec is indeed very stable. Cheers, S.