How do you capture the InDesign cursor ?

[Mike Witherell]

Hi gang,

Sometimes I need to take screenshots of InDesign doing what InDesign does. 

How do you click a screenshot so as to get InDesign when it has a "loaded cursor" mouse cursor?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

All OS-level screenshot tools I know of tend to suppress the cursor (because, natch); only a few third-party tools I've used have an option to leave it. Even the Windows screen snipper utility suppresses the cursor.

[rob day]

Hi Mike, Do you mean this?:

[Mike Witherell]

Hey Rob, I'm trying to capture a loaded text cursor mouse pointer while in InDesign.

[rob day]

You mean the cursor when you are placing text?

[Mike Witherell]

Yes

[Mike Witherell]

Snagit wont do it. Snipping Tool wont do it. Greenshot sorta does; but doesnt do it...

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

We can't really be down to using our iPhone XV pocket cameras for this, even if they do have a voice chat app. 🙂

[Mike Witherell]

Yes, Rob. How u do dat?

(I'm currently sitting in front of a Windows 11 machine, btw.)

[rob day]

I did it with SnapZ Pro by changing the key command to Control-3.

I’m sure that would work with the MacOS capture utility also—it’s pressing the Command key that hides the load icon

[Mike Witherell]

Let me switch over to my MacBook Pro and try it...

[rob day]

Doesn’t look like it works built-in, at least on OSX

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I found several recent, updated how-tos on the miracle web that say "Do X-Y-Z with the snipping tool to capture the cursor."

They're all wrong.

It must be a day of the week ending in Y.

[rob day]

On OSX the selected area capture did not work but the entire screen does, so try that on MacOS—you’ll have to crop as needed in PS:

[Mike Witherell]

I managed to install a free macOS screenshot software called Snip My. After making a custom shortcut and setting a delay, I managed to get the cursor! Surprising me this is so much hoops to hop through.

I wonder why I cannot do this on a Windows machine?

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

What DOES work (on a Mac) is to capture a VIDEO of your screen. Then you can always grab a single frame out of the video capture.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

My recollection is that the predecessor to the current Window snip tool had a delayed action just like that. I dimly understand that what's on the screen exists in several layers/buffers and thus it's not trivial to capture the cursor, but why it's so universally deprecated now is a mystery.

[Mike Witherell]

After laboriously capturing the complicated "loaded text cursor" icon (way too much going on in that icon), I ended up drawing it vector in Illustrator just so I could scale it up at a decent size.