Blending structured graphics and layout

ABSTRACT

Conventional windowing environments provide separate classes of objects for user interface components, or “widgets,” and graphical objects. Widgets negotiate layout and can be resized as rectangles, while graphics may be shared, transformed, transparent, and overlaid. This presents a major obstacle to applications like user interface builders and compound document editors where the manipulated objects need to behave both like graphics and widgets.Fresco[1] blends graphics and widgets into a single class of objects. We have an implementation of Fresco and an editor called Fdraw that allows graphical objects to be composed like widgets, and widgets to be transformed and shared like graphics. Performance measurements of Fdraw show that sharing reduces memory usage without slowing down redisplay.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Windowing systems

Additional Classification:
  F. Theory of Computation
  F.2 ANALYSIS OF ALGORITHMS AND PROBLEM COMPLEXITY
      F.2.2 Nonnumerical Algorithms and Problems
          Subjects: Geometrical problems and computations

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.4 Graphics Utilities
          Subjects: Graphics editors

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
object-oriented graphics, structured graphics, user interface builder, user interface toolkit