Scroll only when text exceeds max width

[Kellsen]

Heya,

I have my Conky set up so it displays what's playing on my music player (deadbeef).
So I have a max width set to prevent the Conky to go "out of bounds". When i.e. the song title exceeds the max width it now obviously gets cut off.
When I set the ${scroll} variable it does what I want it to do but it does that with all titles even if they would fit the max width which I find a bit irritating.

Is there an option to set the ${scroll} only for the titles that exceed the max width and don't scroll for text that fits the boundaries?

See the screenshots for the problem.

Cheers!

[Caellian]

I don't think there is (though it would be useful).

You can achieve what you're looking for from lua though by:

• Figuring out bounding coordinates (given that the position is fixed (i.e. no variable height content above))
• Testing text width with cairo-text-extents
  • If it can fit, render it normally
  • Else, render with special render function

Special render function takes current time, text and bounds:

• render text onto a separate surface with x position adjusted by some interpolation function
• apply effects (e.g. fade on edges)
• copy a fixed part of that surface onto main (example)

I'm sorry my explanation is sparse, I'm a bit short on time. Feel free to mention me if you do decide to implement it yourself and get stuck, I'll reply asap.

[Kellsen]

Alright, cheers for your answer 👍
Tbh I can't be bothered. I wrote quite a few scripts for this Conky already and I have no idea what I'm doing in the first place. Just stitched together with zero proper knowledge. I'm surprised it's working at all 😄
But if you agree it would be a nice feature maybe we can put that in the "Requests" section?

[Caellian]

Moved the discussion to Ideas. TBH, there's a whole bunch of work left for Wayland support so this I probably not getting implemented that soon unless someone creates a PR.

If you end up implementing it in Lua, do share because Conky also uses cairo internally so it'd probably help out the person implementing this.