Improving cursor rendering on Wayland

Re:Improving cursor rendering on Wayland by sp1rit on Friday March 15, 2024 @04:28PM (#39720362)

The thing I like about the Xcursor image format is that it so extremely simple[0]. Every semi-competent developer should be able to implement a parser/writer for the format in under an hour.

But encoding the images with PNG does make sense, given the wide availability of libpng and the potential file size savings. I don't know how the feel about SVG support. One the one hand using vector graphics for cursors seems like a great idea but SVG is a very complex format, with the only real parser available being librsvg, which massively increases toolchain complexity. Too bad PostScript doesn't support transparency.

[0]:https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/man/man3/Xcursor.3.xh...

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Re:Improving cursor rendering on Wayland by layer8 on Friday March 15, 2024 @05:11PM (#39720760)

> PostScript

I’m not sure we want a turing-complete language as a cursor format. ;)

But I agree that a simpler vector format than the kitchen sink that is SVG would be good.

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Re:Improving cursor rendering on Wayland by iforgotpassword on Friday March 15, 2024 @07:50PM (#39721909)

Makes me think of the haiku icon format.

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Re:Improving cursor rendering on Wayland by thayne on Saturday March 16, 2024 @12:43AM (#39723463)

I think the world is badly in need of a simple, modern, and widely available vector graphics format.

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