Overview of the Background Panel

Documentation / Contents - Background

• Overview of the Background Panel
  • The Two Pages
  • The Buttons Along the Bottom
• Choosing a Pattern
• Choosing a Picture
  • The Picture List
  • The Preview and the Facts Line
• Placing a Picture
  • Fill (crop to fit)
  • Stretch
  • Scale (letterbox)
  • Center
  • Tile
• Colour Schemes
  • The Scheme List
  • Lock Scheme to Wallpaper
  • Make Scheme From Wallpaper
• The Canonical Panels
• Where the Settings Live
  • Adding Your Own Pictures
• Copyright Information

The Background Panel

The background panel sets what your desktop is covered with: a pattern, or a photograph, together with the colour scheme the rest of the desktop is drawn in. Blueprint's program for this is called cywall. Its window is titled "Background Setting".

The Two Pages

The panel opens with two tabbed pages.

Patterns    the six built-in patterns
Pictures    wallpapers, placement and schemes

Patterns is the page IRIX had. Pictures is a Blueprint addition, and it is where the colour scheme picker sits, so that a wallpaper and the scheme that suits it can be chosen together.

In This Book

• Choosing a Pattern
• Choosing a Picture
• Placing a Picture
• Colour Schemes
• The Canonical Panels
• Where the Settings Live

The Buttons Along the Bottom

Apply      set the background and the scheme
Reset ...  put the background back; asks first
Cancel     close the panel without applying anything further
Help       open this book

Nothing on this panel changes your desktop until you press Apply. Clicking around the lists is free: the preview updates, the root window does not.

Reset ends in an ellipsis because it raises a confirmation dialog. Cancel closes the window; it does not undo an Apply you have already made.

What Apply Actually Does

Apply writes your choice to your settings file and then draws it. Drawing is done by the picture tool, which scales the image properly, with a box filter when it shrinks and a bilinear one when it enlarges. That is why a downscaled photograph on the root window does not have the sparkle that a naive point sample gives you.

When a colour scheme is selected as well, Apply hands that to the scheme daemon at the same time, so the wallpaper and the window colours change together rather than a beat apart.