Creating perfect cursors in Revolution

[Stgoldberg at aol.com]

For the past two years I've benefited greatly from advice given through this 
forum, so I'd like to give something back in return.   Creating cursors in 
Revolution has been problematic. Despite creating 16x16 images in black and 
white, sometimes the cursors do not show up correctly on both platforms. Sometimes 
there is only a white square or a black filled-in image.   The following 
method shows how to   produce perfect cursors every time for both Macintosh and 
Windows (qualifier: I used Mac OS X, Revolution 2.7 and Photoshop 7.0 to create 
them, and I'm not sure how other versions would work):

Directions for making cursors in Revolution:
1.   Open Photoshop. Name the image, Mode being RGB color, Background 
Transparent, and width and height 16 pixels.
2.   Change Image/Mode to Indexed Color, using the defaults for indexed color 
(Palette: Exact; Forced: Web; Transparency checked; Matte: none)
3. With image maximally magnified, used the pencil tool to insert black or 
white pixels.   Enclosed areas can be filled with white or black if desired and 
pixels can be erased if desired.
4.   Save as PNG.   
5.   Bring the PNG image into Revolution and note it's ID number (it may be 
1003 for instance).
6.   In the script to call the cursor write:
on mouseUp
set lockcursor to true
set the cursor to 1003 -- if that's the ID number
end mouseUp

It is interesting that sometimes there can two identical pictures in 
Photoshop, one of which will show up cursors correctly and the other will show up only 
a white square or a black filled image, even though all the parameters in 
Photoshop seem to be the same!!   I don't know why this should be the case but it 
implies that there is something different about the two images even if not 
apparent.   This can be easily corrected either by creating a new Photoshop 
16x16 document, carefully duplicating the pixels of the defective image, or more 
simply, just pasting the defective image into the new Photoshop document.   The 
cursors should then appear fine.

I plan to attend the Revolution conference next week in Monterey and will 
bring 25 cursors I've created for those interested in using them.   Perhaps they 
might be incorporated into a future version of Revolution.
Steve Goldberg
President, MedMaster Inc
stgoldberg at aol.com
www. medmaster.net