Gromit

Gromit is a program written by Simon Budig <simon (at) gimp.org > to place a transparent X window above the screen onto which one can use the mouse or a tablet to write. ( Go here to download the original version by Simon Budig) This has been found to be very useful in lectures while using openoffice impress slides, and wanting to add annotations to the screen. Openoffice has a "mouse as pencil" facility, but the colour on this is unchangeable and horrible ( light green on a white background is unreadable), the pen width is unchangeable, and the writing cannot be saved.

Gromit allows use of a tablet (eg I have used a Wacom Bamboo tablet) to write, with the thickness of the line depending on the pen pressure, erase, use different colours for the pen etc.

I have written a minor extention to this program The only purpose of my addition is to add the ability to save the screen image. It uses an external program to do this, in my case the program "import" from the ImageMagic package. It adds the two options

-p programname When the alt-ctrl-Pause is pressed, the external program "programname" is run. I use the included script "snap" which finds the lowest unused number file snapshot#.png in the home directory ~/snapshot, and uses the program "image" from ImageMagik to write an image of the screen to that file.
-s This flag, which is ignored unless the -p option is used, runs the program designated by the -p option whenever the screen is erased with the Shift-Pause of gromit. (This is the standard button used by gromit to clear the screen).
snap This is not part of gromit, but is a sample shell script used to grab the screen. It searches the directory ~/snapshot for the lowest number file snapshot#.png which is not used, and then uses import from the ImageMagic package to grab the screen image and save it to the file. This shell script can be changed to do whatever you want or to use some other capture facility if you want. It is not advisible to use something which opens an X window, since gromit has control of the cursor, and you may not be able to do anything with the mouse if the program requires mouse input (clicking buttons for example).

In the package I have also included the fixes to gromit developed by Pierre Chifflier < chifflier (at) cpe.fr %gt; for Debian (including a fix for multiheaded monitor situations), and have also included an extention of the man page written by Pierre Chifflier and Simon Budig to include the new options and also including the format of the .gromitrc file.

Note that this addition to gromit is a bit of a kludge. It would be far better if the the external program name were specified within the .gromitrc file instead of on the gromit command line. I am simply too incompetent at GTK programming to do this however.