Abstracted Mouse Pointer Interface

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Abstract: We need to create a new image format that allows standard pointer shapes to be specified in a way that works on all Windows systems. I suggest that this be called pointer, which has one tag associated with it, named :data, and whose value is a string. The possible strings that can be specified here are predefined by XEmacs, and are guaranteed to work across all Windows systems. This means that we may need to provide our own definition for pointer shapes that are not standard on some systems. In particular, there are a lot more standard pointer shapes under X than under Windows, and most of these pointer shapes are fairly useful. There are also a few pointer shapes (I think the hand, for example) on Windows, but not on X. Converting the X pointer shapes to Windows should be easy because the definitions of the pointer shapes are simply XBM files, which we can read under Windows. Going the other way might be a little bit more difficult, but it should still not be that hard.

While we're at it, we should change the image format currently called cursor-font to x-cursor-font, because it only works under X Windows. We also need to change the format called resource to be mswindows-resource. At least in the case of cursor-font, the old value should be maintained for compatibility as an obsolete alias. The resource format was added so recently that it's possible that we can just change it.

Ben Wing

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