I'd like to write a screenshot tool in Python. Right now i'm studying how I could do. I've got a script making a screenshot using win32 api like here, but want to include the mouse pointer in the screenshot.
With win32gui.GetCursorInfo() i get its state (shown/hidden), its handle and its position. My goal is to use the handle to access the actual bitmap of the cursor, copy it, and add it to my screenshot at the right coordinates. However, I can't seem to find any doc saying what I can do with that handle once I got it.
I'm thinking i might have to do like the screenshot itself, i.e. get a DC of the cursor, create a bitmap compatible with it and copy into it with BitBlt. Am I on the right track?
Does the python win32 api include DrawIconEx:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms648065%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
you need to make a drawable context to write it on, and then pass that and the cursor handle...
(or plain DrawIcon)
Anther option is to actually use Python Imaging Library (PIL)
you can easily edit bitmap with it.
(much simpler then actually using win32 apis.)
you can use ImageGrab, and ImageDraw
Once you get the cursor's icon handle from GetCursorInfo, you can draw it with DrawIcon or DrawIconEx, which I presume the Win32 API module you're using supports. You will need to create a DC for the screenshot bitmap to render the icon to, yes, but I don't think you'll need to create a DC for the cursor icon itself -- DrawIcon should be sufficient.
Related
What I'd like to do is find out the type of cursor (ie. pointer, normal, insert) currently active in Linux using python.
I've found one post mentioning that for windows using win32gui: The way to detect the current mouse cursor type from bash or python
win32gui is Windows-specific and this library will not work in Linux. Any other solutions?
Use this library PyXCursor to get the image of cursor/mouse-pointer for an arbitrary application window in Linux - in Python using ctypes
Update: I have come up with three solutions, but they are rather effort and resource-intensive. And I haven't tested them out, so I don't know about any roadblocks. So at this point, I would still appreciate alternative solutions to this problem.
(1) You could find out the location of the mouse pointer using pyautogui and then take a snapshot of the pointer. Then you could compare this image with a test image of a cursor and calculate how similar both images look like using OpenCV.
(2) Run win32gui via Wine like service and send cursor data to linux application.
(3) Use python's ctype module to call XFixes C library's XFixesGetCursorImage(display) function.
Is there a simple way to use pygame to switch to an OS-defined cursor? For example, switching to the windows loading circle or apple beach-ball when loading, or changing to arrows when hovering over a draggable object?
Pygame provides the cursor module for loading a bitmap to replace the cursor, but I'd like to defer to the OS-defined cursors instead.
From: link, if anyone still finds it useful:
you can use the pygame.mouse.set_cursor method with e. g. pygame.SYSTEM_CURSOR_WAIT as the first argument.
I wanted to use Python to create animations (video) containing text and simple moving geometric objects (lines, rectangles, circles and so on).
In the book titled "Python 2.6 Graphics Cookbook" I found examples using Tkinter library. First, it looked like what I need. I was able to create simple animation but then I realized that in the end I want to have a file containing my animation (in gif or mp4 format). However, what I have, is an application with GUI running on my computer and showing me my animation.
Is there a simple way to save the animation that I see in my GUI in a file?
There is no simple way.
The question Programmatically generate video or animated GIF in Python? has answers related strictly to creating these files with python (ie: it doesn't mention tkinter).
The question How can I convert canvas content to an image? has answers related to saving the canvas as an image
You might be able to take the best answers from those two questions and combine them into a single program.
I've accomplished this before, but not in a particularly pretty way.
Tl;dr save your canvas as an image at each step of the iteration, use external tools to convert from image to gif
This won't require any external dependencies or new packages except having imagemagick already installed on your machine
Save the image
I assume that you're using a Tkinter canvas object. If you're posting actual images to the tk widgets, it will probably be much easier to save them; the tk canvas doesn't have a built-in save function except as postcript. Postscript might actually be fine for making the animation, but otherwise you can
Concurrently draw in PIL and save the PIL image https://www.daniweb.com/software-development/python/code/216929/saving-a-tkinter-canvas-drawing-python
Take a screenshot at every step, maybe using imagegrab http://effbot.org/imagingbook/imagegrab.htm
Converting the images to to an animation
Once the images are saved, I used imagemagick to dump them into either a gif, or into a mpg. You can run the command right from python using How to run imagemagick in the background from python or something similar. It also means that the process is implictely run on a separate thread, so it won't halt your program while it happens. You can query the file to find out when the process is done.
The command
convert ../location/*.ps -quality 100 ../location/animation.gif
should do the trick.
Quirks:
There are some small details, and the process isn't perfect. Imagemagick reads files in order, so you'll need to save the files so that alphabetical and chronological line up. Beware that the name
name9.ps
Is alphabetically greater than
name10.ps
From imagemagick's point of view.
If you don't have imagemagick, you can download it easily (its a super useful command-line tool to have) on linux and mac, and cygwin comes with it on windows. If you're worried about portability... well... PIL isn't standard either
There is a way of doing that, with the "recording screen method", this was explained in other question: "how can you record your screen in a gif?".
Click the link -->LICEcap : https://github.com/lepht/licecap
They say that it's free software for Mac (OS X) and Windows
You could look at Panda3D, but it could be a little over killed for what you need.
I would say you can use Blender3d too but i'm not really sure of how it works. Someone more experimented then me could tell you more about this.
I am trying to understand how I can use PIL in Python 2.7 to search the whole screen for a certain image and click on it. I've been searching around and haven't been able to find a solution. I want to create a small GUI with one button in the middle of it that when clicked will search the entire screen for a predefined image. Once the image is found the program will then click in the centre of it and end. In short the program will detect if an image is present on the users screen and click it.
I did find an interesting bit on Sikuli, but that doesn't help me because it's unable to export to an .exe.
The image that the program will look for will most likely be in the same place each time it searches, but I didn't want to hard-code the location as it has the potential to move and I don't want that being an issue later on.
What I need is the code method I would use to search for the image on screen and send back the cords to a variable.
Image explanation/example:
Reference image of rifle:
PIL is the wrong tool for this job. Instead you should look into openCV (open source computer vision), which has fantastic python bindings. Here is a link to an example (in C but should be easy to redo with the python bindings) that does what you are looking for, but even allows the image to be rotated, scaled, etc.
http://docs.opencv.org/doc/tutorials/features2d/feature_homography/feature_homography.html
http://docs.opencv.org/doc/tutorials/features2d/detection_of_planar_objects/detection_of_planar_objects.html
Edit:
I assume you are using windows, as your example image looks like window. In this case you can use:
from PIL import ImageGrab
pil_img = ImageGrab.grab()
opencv_img = numpy.array(pil_img)
then use opencv to process the image to find sub image you are looking for.
If you want to do this cross platform, then you will need to use wxWidgets to do the screengrab: https://stackoverflow.com/a/10089645/455532
Even I wanted to do the same but using different module - pyautogui. I finally found the solution for my problem and I am sure this solution will also help you.
You have to just go to this webpage and read the locate function topic completely
and you'll be able to solve your problem.
I recommend you give a look on PyAutoGUI, a well documented library to control mouse and keyboard, also can locate imagens on screen, find the position, move the mouse to any location and clicks on location, also can simulate drag and drop, type on input fields, give double clicks and much more.
I managed to get it working on Win32 (inheriting from wx.MiniFrame does the trick), on wxGTK (wx.PopupWindow) but whatever I try, when I create a frame on wxMac, my main window loses focus and the new frame gets it.
wxMac does not seem to have a way to interact with the native platform (something like GetHandle() on Win32 and GetGTKWidget() on wxGTK), so I can't hack around it this way.
I managed to get this working in another situation, by creating the frame at startup and moving it outside of the display area, then moving it in a visible position when needed. But right now this would be cumbersome because I don't know in advance how many frames I will need.
So, any simpler way to do this ?
If you want to get native handle to window in Mac you can do
frame.MacGetTopLevelWindowRef()
and may be you can use pyobjc to interact with windows natively, but why don't you set focus on the window you want to after opening mini-frame?