Re: Emacs canvas support

[Corwin Brust <corwin@bru.st>]

Hi everyone!  This is conversation intersects very directly with a
project I organize that is creating an RPG game engine and
authoring/publishing enhancements based on org-mode and svg.el.  Our
project is very new and the things that work only work if one is
careful and patient.  We're targeting whatever will likely be
supported in Emacs 28 or so, meaning we would be open to help testing
new features that come out of this and similar conversations, if any,
and given we're up the tasks.  (Our application for savannah hosting
is in progress; I've no interest to discuss the project's current
non-free hosting solution.)

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 11:55 AM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> > From: David Engster <deng@randomsample.de>
> > Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2020 18:14:55 +0200
> >
> > IMHO, What would be much more exciting, is if you could draw directly
> > over normal text. This would enable a whole new set of
> > possibilities.


> [..] not too much effort.  Would someone want to come up
> with a reasonable list of requirements for such a feature?


To the extent it may help with developing the list you suggested, I
wanted to share this SVG image from our project:

   https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dungeon-mode/game/master/Docs/battleboard/Battleboard.svg

This file mocks an important player interface that shows the vital
statistics for each of the eight player-characters that compose the
"party".   The four inner boxes inside each plus-shape create a space
for one such statistic, for example, Body Hits, Armor Hit Points, etc.
which are displayed integers.  These, like the actual text show in the
mock, should ideally be text.   It seems to me that this should work
well with such overlay methods as are discussed down-thread.

I hope the graphic provides a useful context for on "in the wild"
aspirational use for composed SVG+text in user-space. I'm happy to be
pulled into other threads/conversations related to enhancing display
options for hybrid text and SVG.

PS, For the "mapping" feature (the party controls their movement
through a maze), which is the only truly implicitly graphical
component we are creating, we have resorted.to drawing text overlays
with the "text" SVG element; however, for the battle-board, we had
been planning to use a window for each character (so eight windows)
and slices within to achieve the crisp lines and while allowing some
room for some theming.

-- 
Corwin
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corwin@bru.st