Simulating transparency in SWT with screenshots

Question

I am trying to take a screenshot of whatevers behind a shell for the purposes of simulating transparency... I have the following code:
shell.setVisible(false);
shell.update();
background = new Image(display, bounds.width, bounds.height);
gc = new GC(display);
gc.copyArea(background, x, y);
gc.dispose();
shell.setVisible(true);This sorta works. It takes a screenshot and the screenshot has the general outline of what's behind it, but it doesn't work for capturing the desktop or the details of a window. For example, it will capture the outline of a window and the background color of a menubar, but it will not capture the word "File" which is on that menu. To clarify, it captures the window itself (the window behind it, that is) but not any of the details of the window.
My first thought was that i wasn't leaving time for the window manager to draw the contents of the windows, but sleeping the thread in the middle didn't change anything.
I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this for me.
Oh, and perhaps it might matter: I'm using SWT 3.2, java 1.5, Linux with XFCE and a the proprietary ati graphics driver... not using xcompmgr.
Thanks for any help,
Qest

Answer 1

I believe you are wrong on that one. To my knowledge, SWT does not support any sort of transparency for shells. You can, however, use non-rectanglear window shapes to simulate transparency, but I am already doing this in addition to what I posted in my original post and it doesn't satisfy my requirement completely.