Re: How does the "print screen" function work?

[Evan Martin <martine cs washington edu>]

On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 03:27:54PM +0900, hamb ka wrote:
> I am writing an application which is supposed to have some kind of 
> transparent effect. So I am considering of using the screenshot as the 
> background of this application.
> "print screen" needs gnome libraries, right? which one?

Truly transparent windows are currently impossible with x.
If you take a screenshot of the screen and then use it to fill your
window, you won't be able to take future screenshots to update the
background because your window is covering the spot you're trying to
take a picture of.

To get a pixbuf from the screen, use gdk_pixbuf_xlib_get_from_drawable():
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gdk-pixbuf/gdk-pixbuf-gdk-pixbuf-xlib-from-drawables.html

I've written some more about the hacks related to transparency here:
 - http://evan.livejournal.com/590245.html
and wrote how I've managed to make a pseudo-transparent (but more real
than transparent terminals) hack here:
 - http://evan.livejournal.com/591456.html

I didn't go much farther than that, though.

-- 
      Evan Martin
martine cs washington edu
  http://neugierig.org