[racket] erasing a line?

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 10:55 AM, John Riedl <riedl at cs.umn.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> Two interesting problems that I ran into are:
>>>
>>> 1) The bitmap draw routines do not erase the rectangle they draw into.
>>>  I don't know why.  I ended up erasing the rectangle "by hand" with
>>> draw-rectangle with a transparent pen.  (I tried 'solid and 'opaque
>>> styles.  My backing bitmap and canvas are all default for things like
>>> monochrome? and alpha.)
>>
>> I believe the default bitmap is one with no alpha component. If you
>> want one with an opaque background, then you have to initialize it
>> that way instead.
>
> Ahhh!  You put me onto the fix :).  The problem is that I had read the
> docs for make-object bitmap, which makes a bitmap with no alpha
> channel.  However, I was actually using make-bitmap, as recommended in
> the docs.  It turns out that make-bitmap reverses the default to
> create an alpha channel -- but set to zero, whence the transparent
> behavior.  Once I changed the make-bitmap call to force no alpha
> channel, I get the nice boring bitblt behavior I was expecting, so no
> more need for drawing rectangles to erase the region first.  (I think
> your note above has the semantics of no alpha backwards: I believe no
> alpha channel causes boring semantics, which an alpha channel makes
> transparency possible.)
>
> In any case, this is a usability fail.  The two ways of making bitmaps
> should have the same defaults, even if their designers disagree on
> which is preferred :).  To whom do I mention that?

I think you're going to have to take it up with the 15 years or so of
users that wrote code using make-object bitmap% before there was an
alpha channel. :)

In other words, this is an issue forced on us by backwards
compatibility and we don't like it either.

>>> 2) The draw-rectangle draws a little too big of a rectangle,
>>> presumably because of the outline it is drawing with the transparent
>>> pen.  I had to make the draw-bitmap draw just a couple of extra pixels
>>> to make the erase work.
>>
>> That doesn't sound right. Just to double check: coordinates are on the
>> boundaries between pixels, not on the pixels (and drawing in aligned
>> and smoothed and regular mode change some details here and there about
>> how lines are drawn, so maybe that's also confusing things).
>
> I'm not being that fancy.  I just was erasing a rectangle of a given
> size, and then bitblting in exactly that size of a bitmap from my
> backing bitmap to exactly that location.  The erase was erasing a
> pixel more than the bitblt was bringing in, here and there.
> Increasing the size of the bitblt by a pixel fixed the problem.  I
> think the easiest explanation is that the rectangle was drawing a
> little too big ...

Is it possible you were drawing the rectangle with a pen?

Robby