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From: casey@gauss.llnl.gov (Casey Leedom)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Application resource file etiquette
Message-ID: <69391@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 6 Oct 90 19:54:23 GMT
References: <69294@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <1990Oct5.155651.7094@smsc.sony.com> <5637@harrier.ukc.ac.uk>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV
Reply-To: casey@gauss.llnl.gov (Casey Leedom)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lines: 38

/ From:,dce@smsc.sony.com (David Elliott)
| 
| 2. Modify the color namespace to handle "fallback" colors, which would
| 
| 	XTerm*background:	black
\ 	XTerm*foreground:	green(white)

/ From: rlh2@ukc.ac.uk (Richard Hesketh)
| 
| Whilst a complete (or at least better) solution is being developed this
| actually looks quite useful right now.  For toolkit programs all it requires is
| a change in the StringToPixel converter which checks to see what type of 
| screen this conversion is being made on and chooses the appropriate colour.
| 
| Here's a patch to mit/Xt/Converters.c [patchlevel 18] (you can apply the
| patch then rip the converter out and put it in your own programs) that
| changes the StringToPixel converter to recognize the following format:
|
| 	XTerm*foreground:	green/white
| 
| I use a slash "/" because its easier to parse 8-).  I really don't think it
| is any more confusing than specifying any other resource!  The first colour
\ is chosen if the screen has a depth greater than one.

    1.	Thanks for your incentive and investigation into this, but don't
	you think that publishing a note like yours will cause an explosion
	of non-portability as some people impkement your patch and others
	don't?  Or are you an official spokesperson for the X Consortium?
	(Not sarcasm.  An honest question.)

    2.	Nit picking time: wouldn't it be more consistent to use colons (`:')
	as your color name separator as is done for other alternate choices?

  In any case I'm glad to hear people are working on this problem.  It's
really annoying to have to either sanitize every program or include lots
of redundant font and color definitions in my own resource database.

Casey