XOR support for mouse cursors
Ben Swartzlander
ben at swartzlander.org
Sun Nov 11 23:23:46 PST 2007
So perhaps I'm asking the wrong question. What I want is a cursor that
is able to invert the color of the pixels underneath it. For example, an
"I" shaped cursor that looks white over a black background and looks
black over a white background (and stands out suitably from any other
color background) to use for text editing. This is the kind of cursor
that Windows has, and I believe that SDL offers the same type of
cursors. I don't really care how it's implemented, whether a XOR
operation is used or not. If a patent is the only thing standing in the
way of implemented color-inverted cursors, then it should be possible to
copy whatever prior art existed at the time the patent was filed, thus
avoiding any patent problems.
-Ben Swartzlander
Graeme Gill wrote:
> Ben Swartzlander wrote:
>
>
>> Didn't Microsoft Windows 3.0 have XOR cursors? How is it possible to
>> patent something that already existed in a shipping product at the time?
>>
>
> The U.S. Patent Office works in mysterious ways ?
>
> Presumably the patent examiner was convinced that something
> was slightly different in the 1994 patent from previous
> related patents. As I understand it, a patent covers
> the claims minus prior art.
>
>
>> Just so I understand, is it the case that the X.org team has considered
>> implementing XOR cursors, and opted not to purely out of legal fears? Or
>> has it never seriously been considered?
>>
>
> At one stage all the X11 consortium members were threatened by the
> holder of the XOR cursor patent, even though the X11 server didn't
> actually support an XOR cursor itself. A client application was
> the only way of implementing an XOR cursor, simply by using the XOR
> rendering mode (one of the 16 possible modes).
>
> Typically X11 doesn't need to use an XOR cursor, since it supports
> overlay cursors. XOR cursors are usually regarded as a "trick"
> to avoid having to save what's under the cursor, and restore
> it every time the cursor moves.
>
> Graeme Gill.
>
> _______________________________________________
> xorg mailing list
> xorg at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
>
>
More information about the xorg
mailing list