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 1/4 resolution, with each  4x4  square  of
pixels  being  filled  in  with a single color.  Next, each 4x4 square
would be replaced by 4 2x2 squares; finally the 1x1 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
4800-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.
