painting with increasing resolution some people working a few cubes over have come up with this need and it seems that someone out there just might have done it already and can point me to some tools that would help what they d like to do is given a window that is taking a long time to draw because either the data is arriving over a slow link or the display is across a slow link they would like to first paint a low resolution version of the picture and then repaint it in higher resolution thus the picture might first be generated in resolution with each x square of pixels being filled in with a single color next each x square would be replaced by x squares finally the x version would be painted since one of the scenarios is with the window being on the other side of a slow link the low res version obviously wouldn t be transmitted as a bitmap that wouldn t help at all instead there would have to be a process on the far end that receives the low res picture as a small bitmap and blows up each pixel into a square sorta like the magnifier programs do this brings up the question of whether the x server can help that is when a window is opened is there a way to ask that a filter program be run to process the pixels or is the only way to use something like rsh to start up a remote process permission denied and have it open a local window it seems the most likely scenario is a library routine that starts up such a program remotely and then accepts bitmaps compressing each one by some amount and sending them to the remote program to expand but if there is something that x itself can do to help it s be nice to hear about it i looked in several fms but if it s there i obviously don t know the keywords if someone has a nifty tool available that packages it all we might want to get a copy oh yes this is to run on some suns part of the idea is to build demos that can show such things as if this were run across say a bps link this is how fast the pictures would appear then the customer would get a feel for the speed that they need to pay for if the auto industry were like the computer industry a car would now cost would get miles to the gallon and at random times would explode killing all its passengers
