Solaris X Window System Developer's Guide

Retrieving Overlay Color Information

The routine XReadScreen returns the displayed colors in a rectangle of the screen. It thus provides access to the colors displayed on the screen of the given window.

On some types of advanced display devices, the displayed colors can be a composite of the data contained in several different frame stores, and these frame stores can be of different depth and visual types. In addition, there can be overlay/underlay window pairs in which part of the underlay is visible beneath the overlay. Because the data returned by XGetImage is undefined for portions of the rectangle that have different depths, XGetImage is inadequate to return the picture the user is actually seeing on the screen. In addition, XGetImage cannot composite pixel information for an overlay/underlay window pair because the pixel information lies in different drawables. XReadScreen addresses these problems.

Rather than returning pixel information, XReadScreen returns color information—the actual displayed colors visible on the screen. The routine returns the color information from any window within the boundaries of the specified rectangle. Unlike XGetImage, the returned contents of visible regions of inferior or overlapping windows of a different depth than the specified window's depth are not undefined. Instead, the actual displayed colors for these windows is returned.

Note –

The colors returned are the ones that would be displayed if an unlimited number of hardware color LUTs were available on the screen. Thus, the colors returned are the theoretical display colors. If colormap flashing is present on the screen because there aren't enough hardware color LUTs to display all of the software colormaps simultaneously, the returned colors may be different from the colors that are actually displayed.

The syntax and arguments for this routine are shown below.

XImage

* XReadScreen (Display *display, Window w, int x, int y,

   unsigned int width, unsigned int height,

  Bool includeCursor)

`display`	Specifies the connection to the X server.
`w`	Specifies the window from whose screen the data is read.
`x`, `y`	Specify the X and Y coordinates of the upper-left corner of the rectangle relative to the origin of the window `w`.
`width`, `height`	Specify the width and height of the rectangle.
`includeCursor`	Specifies whether the cursor image is to be included in the colors returned.

If w is an overlay window, the overlay color information is returned wherever there is opaque paint in the specified rectangle. The color information of the underlay is returned wherever there is transparent paint in the overlay. In general, since this underlay can be an overlay window containing transparent paint, the color information for a coordinate (x, y) that contains transparent paint is the youngest non-inferior that has opaque paint at (x, y).

The color data is returned as an XImage structure. The returned image has the same width and height as the arguments specified. The format of the image is ZPixmap. The depth of the image is 24 and the bits_per_pixel is 32. The most significant 8 bits of color information for each color channel (red, green, blue) are returned in the bit positions defined by red_mask, green_mask, and blue_mask in the XImage. The values of the following attributes of the XImage are server dependent: byte_order, bitmap_unit, bitmap_bit_order, bitmap_pad, bytes_per_line, red_mask, green_mask, blue_mask.

If includeCursor is True, the cursor image is included in the returned colors. Otherwise, it is excluded.

Note that the borders of the argument window (and other windows) can be included and read with this request.

If a problem occurs, XReadScreen returns NULL.