Hi,

"Ken Tanaka" writes:

I'd like to have the mouse cursor arrow appear in the window of an acquired screenshot. This is for when I want to illustrate a pulldown menu item. When I use the Acquire screenshot functionality of the GIMP, the cursor doesn't appear. Is there a way to have the cursor show up? Perhaps a different screenshot program, but all the ones I've seen on my system also leave the cursor arrow out of the screenshot.

The way the X window system works basically makes it impossible to take a screenshot that shows the mouse cursor. So you need to add it later (programmatically or manually).

I'd rather not have to draw a cursor on the image later. Might not be so bad if there was a brush shape that looked like an arrow. Is it possible to add a cursor arrow brush? If so it's probably already been done, but I don't know where to get it.

All cursors that GIMP uses are available as PNG files in the GIMP source tree. Standard X cursors can certainly also be downloaded as image files somewhere. In order to create a GIMP brush from such an image file, all you need to do is to save it in your personal brushes folder ~/gimp-x.y/brushes.

Perhaps someone wants to make a nice collection of mouse cursor brushes for The GIMP?

I'm using GIMP 1.2.3

Please upgrade to GIMP 2.2 then. That won't add a mouse cursor to your screenshots, but there are enough other good reasons.

Sven

Ken.Tanaka@noaa.gov (2005-01-14 at 1518.18 -0700):

I'd like to have the mouse cursor arrow appear in the window of an acquired screenshot. This is for when I want to illustrate a pulldown menu item. When I use the Acquire screenshot functionality of the GIMP, the cursor doesn't appear. Is there a way to have the cursor show up? Perhaps a different screenshot program, but all the ones I've seen on my system also leave the cursor arrow out of the screenshot.

It is how X11 works. There are plans to allow apps to ask about what cursor is in use, but not yet.

I'd rather not have to draw a cursor on the image later. Might not be so bad if there was a brush shape that looked like an arrow. Is it possible to add a cursor arrow brush? If so it's probably already been done, but I don't know where to get it.

Yes, from cursor themes or from the default cursor font (yep, that is what the cursors were until recently). So get one arrow from there, and paste it more or less where the cursor really was.

Quick trick if you want the plain X11 cursors:

1 Run xfd -fn cursor, resize it if necesary, so things do not overlap.

2 Take a screenshot of it.

3 In gimp, duplicate the background (bg-l for short) and set top layer to difference, call it diff-l.

4 Move diff-l to the right, one column, and align so you get first column without any overlap but 2nd, 4th, ... N*2 overlap and show the cursors with black bg, and 3th, 5th N*2+1 as random crap due unrelated images mixing. Be careful, or use the arrow keys, so you get the perfect match, it is not hard to see anyway.

5 Copy the bg-l again, and move it to the top of stack, name it helper-l, set it to not visible so you can see next step.

6 Merge diff-l and bg-l, to get merged-l.

7 Add a layer mask to merged-l.

8 Invert helper-l colours, then select all of it and copy. Toogle visible if you need for this step.

9 Activate the layer mask of merged-l and paste, apply the layer mask. And you are ready to cut any cursors you like.

I think those are more or less all the steps.

Steps 5, 7, 8 and 9 can be ignored if you crop to one cursor and clean up the black background that will be left around it, for example with the magic wand as selection method.

GSR

On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 03:18:18PM -0700, Ken Tanaka wrote:

I'd like to have the mouse cursor arrow appear in the window of an acquired screenshot. This is for when I want to illustrate a pulldown menu item. When I use the Acquire screenshot functionality of the GIMP, the cursor doesn't appear. Is there a way to have the cursor show up? Perhaps a different screenshot program, but all the ones I've seen on my system also leave the cursor arrow out of the screenshot.

I'd rather not have to draw a cursor on the image later. Might not be so bad if there was a brush shape that looked like an arrow. Is it possible to add a cursor arrow brush? If so it's probably already been done, but I don't know where to get it.

I'm using GIMP 1.2.3 KDE 3.1.3-6.6 Red Hat
Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 3 (Taroon Update 4) (2.4.21-27.0.1.EL)

If this is in the documentation please let me know, I couldn't find it there or online in mail list archives or GIMP website.

this is a condition of the xserver.

i do not remember the technical details, but when i started to try to document gimp things, the developers told me then that they were smart enough to know where the curser graphics were stored and used that if they needed the curser to appear on the screenshot.

other solutions (which may or may not work, i dont really know) would be to use directfb to draw your display, or perhaps cairo.

i have not followed up on this information in years, it might be wrong.

in defense of the xserver. it is decades old! could you imagine things like a tablet way back in the '80s? maybe i could have imagined it, but i still have a problem imagining how it would work. i think it is fairly impressive that the design has worked so well for so long.

sorry to type bad news unless it is incorrect....

carol

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 03:48:30PM -0700, Ken Tanaka wrote:

Thank you for the various input and suggestions. I'll use the "xfd -fn cursor" command to get some images that I can reuse as needed later as a cursor.

if your screenshot is of the gimp's image window, there are those little triangles on the rulers to help you see where the cursor actually was.

carol