XDrawImageString(3)

okay so bestie, we’re in XDrawImageString(3) from XLIB FUNCTIONS, and this page is literally about drawing image text. Buckle up, we’re keeping every receipt 💖.

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✨ NAME ✨

XDrawImageString, XDrawImageString16 — draw image text. That’s the whole assignment: image text, no cap. 💅

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🌸 SYNTAX 🌸

int XDrawImageString(Display *display, Drawable d, GC gc, int x, int y,
       _Xconst char *string, int length);

int XDrawImageString16(Display *display, Drawable d, GC gc, int x, int y,
       _Xconst XChar2b *string, int length);

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🎀 ARGUMENTS 🎀

• d — Specifies the drawable.
• display — Specifies the connection to the X server.
• gc — Specifies the GC.
• length — Specifies the number of characters in the string argument.
• string — Specifies the character string.
• x, y — Specify the x and y coordinates, which are relative to the origin of the specified drawable and define the origin of the first character.

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So the tea is: XDrawImageString16 is similar to XDrawImageString, except it uses 2-byte or 16-bit characters. Both functions also use both the foreground and background pixels of the GC in the destination. 💖

Here’s the vibe of what happens: first, a destination rectangle gets filled with the background pixel defined in the GC, and then the text is painted with the foreground pixel. The upper-left corner of that filled rectangle is at:

[x, y - font-ascent]

The width is:

overall-width

The height is:

font-ascent + font-descent

The overall-width, font-ascent, and font-descent are as would be returned by XQueryTextExtents using gc and string. The function and fill-style defined in the GC are ignored for these functions. The effective function is GXcopy, and the effective fill-style is FillSolid. Periodt. 💅

For fonts defined with 2-byte matrix indexing and used with XDrawImageString, each byte is used as a byte2 with a byte1 of zero. 🫶

Both functions use these GC components: plane-mask, foreground, background, font, subwindow-mode, clip-x-origin, clip-y-origin, and clip-mask.

XDrawImageString and XDrawImageString16 can generate BadDrawable, BadGC, and BadMatch errors.

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💀 DIAGNOSTICS 💀

• BadDrawable — A value for a Drawable argument does not name a defined Window or Pixmap.
• BadGC — A value for a GContext argument does not name a defined GContext.
• BadMatch — An InputOnly window is used as a Drawable.
• BadMatch — Some argument or pair of arguments has the correct type and range but fails to match in some other way required by the request.

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🌈 NOTES 🌈

Unlike XDrawString and XDrawString16, these functions send no more than 255 characters at a time to the server. When the total number of characters to be sent is larger than 255, these functions split the string into chunks up to 255 characters. After sending each chunk, these functions query the server to determine the actual text extent. 255-character chunk era, fr fr 😭

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⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

• XDrawString(3)
• XDrawText(3)
• XLoadFont(3)
• XTextExtents(3)
• Xlib - C Language X Interface

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bye bestie! 🫶 Footer stamp: X Version 11, libX11 1.8.14, and page XDrawImageString(3) — that’s the source/version + page line, and there’s no date field in this footer, so I’m not inventing one. 💅