Re: Drawing transparent images?

[Alexander Malmberg]

Björn Giesler wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to create a transparent NSImage from my program,
> but all I get is a grey block,

How do you check what you got in the image?

[snip]
>   [[NSColor clearColor] set];
>   NSRectFill(NSMakeRect(0, 0, size.width, size.height));

This is a noop. Drawing an invisible rectangle doesn't change the
contents of the buffer. What you want is probably:

NSRectFillUsingOperation(NSMakeRect(...), NSCompositeClear);

which will clear the buffer. NSCompositeCopy and setting the color would
also work. A plain NSRectFill() is equivalent to using
NSCompositeSourceOver.

>   [[NSColor blackColor] set];

This is also a noop. The color used to draw the text will come from the
attributes of the string. It's black by default. If you want to force it
black, do:

[str addAttribute: NSForegroundColorAttributeName
        value: [NSColor blackColor]
        range: NSMakeRange(0,[[str string] length)];

>   [str drawAtPoint: NSZeroPoint];
> 
> All I get is a grey box. If I pass hasAlpha: NO, I get a grey
> box with some text on it, but it's still grey, not transparent.
> 
> Is this a known bug?

back-art doesn't do text drawing in buffers with alpha (ie. the alpha
channel is ignored, which causes problems). It will probably be a while
before I get around to fixing this (I want to clean up the code involved
before adding new stuff).

- Alexander Malmberg