OLGX
More info
- Creator
- Sun Microsystems
- Type
- Drawing library (C)
Sun's OPEN LOOK Graphics Library: the C library that drew buttons, elevators and pushpins for both the olwm window manager and the XView toolkit, so the two looked exactly alike.
A graphical interface has two camps doing the drawing: the window manager, which paints frames and menus, and the toolkit, which paints the buttons inside the windows. Sun avoided ending up with two interpretations of OPEN LOOK by putting all the pixel work in one shared library, libolgx. olwm, olvwm and XView all called the same olgx_draw_button, olgx_draw_elevator and olgx_draw_pushpin, and got the same bevelled edges, the same elevator and the same pushpin.
The library drew in two modes, flat for monochrome screens and three-dimensional with highlight and shadow colours, and took its arrows, check marks and menu marks from a dedicated glyph font, -sun-open look glyph-, rather than drawing them with line segments. The code shipped with XView when Sun released it as source in the early 1990s and lived on in the Linux distributions' XView packages long after Sun itself had moved to CDE. OLIT, AT&T's Xt-based toolkit, did its own drawing instead, which is one reason the two OPEN LOOK worlds never looked quite the same.