How to do pretty OSD in Python

Question

Is there a library to do pretty on screen display with Python (mainly on Linux but preferably available on other OS too) ? I know there is python-osd but it uses libxosd which looks quite old. I would not call it pretty.

Maybe a Python binding for libaosd. But I did not find any.

Answer 1

Actually, xosd isn't all that old; I went to university with the original author (Andre Renaud, who is a superlative programmer). It is quite low level, but pretty simple - xosd.c is only 1365 lines long. It wouldn't be hard to tweak it to display pretty much anything you want.

Answer 2

Using PyGTK on X it's possible to scrape the screen background and composite the image with a standard Pango layout.

I have some code that does this at http://svn.sacredchao.net/svn/quodlibet/trunk/plugins/events/animosd.py. It's a bit ugly and long, but mostly straightforward.