Hi, I wonder if anyone knows of a way to get Ashell to effectively do a screen print, but direct to a pre-defined windows printer.

Our end user used to have a facility to just select print, and the screen text would be printed out. Needless to say they don’t particularly want to screen capture, and then enter another application just to print it!

Just a thought, any help appreciated.

There is a lot of discussion about screen printing under Program Development, pcklst.sbr that Jack and I had some time back that you may want to read. I do screen prints 2 ways. The second will not work when inside xcall pcklst, so there I use the first method.

First, you can press ^P and get prompted with several questions one of which is the printer you want to print the screen to. Optionally you can specify the printer in miame.ini and a no dialogue option and get the screen print to the printer specified with no questions asked. To do this, add PRINTER=PRINT1,PRINT1,NoDlg to miame.ini. The second printer is the default for screen prints and NoDlg keeps the user from being prompted.

Second I use a call to miamex subroutine,
Xcall MIAMEX, 65, 0. This saves the screen in a file named jobname.buf. You can then print this in any manner you like.

Herman

Thank Herman,
We have only just come across this print screen problem since we installed the Microsabio Ashell at a customers site, before hand they was running the Debug/Chairman version which had a print screen menu option when you clicked on file.

I will have a look into the Control-P option, trouble is we current use this already in our own INPUT subroutine for something else.

(Unless its easy Jack to put a print screen menu option in like the Debug/Chairman version)

idea!
If its not that easy to add into Ashell Windows as a file option I guess I could write a small print screen program in Delphi and attach it to the Ashell windows menus bar.

I have written a small capture screen PC program (in Delphi) and linked it to the Ashell windows drop down menu. when the option it selected it takes a screen shot and load the BMP file into the windows default viewer for BMP files. (user then has a choose what they would like to do from there).
If anyone finds this useful just email me and i'll email you the EXE etc.

Yes, I would be interested in your graphic screen capture/print utility. I will also give some thought to adding an alternative menu driven way to get at the ^P version (at least for Windows), or perhaps allow you to define some other control character (as if they weren't already all accounted for!). In some cases, the text version is more handy (smaller, easier to print, edit, etc.) but obviously the graphic version is much nicer to look at.

One other note: I'm not sure if it was clear from Herman's comments but the PRINTER statement in the MIAME.INI allows you to define a printer to be the default for screen prints (using the ^P method.) Here's the blurb for it from the 825.1 build development notes:

Yet another related comment for Windows environments: If you want to maintain your own list of default printers for various situations but want to allow the user to choose them using standard Windows printer selection dialogs, you can use XCALL MIAMEX function 120, which is just like printing to the PROMPT: printer except it only returns the name of the selected printer. (And now that A-Shell/Windows allows you to use the full Windows printer name in XCALL SPOOL instead of the 6 character AMOS-style name, you can therefore use the selected printer name directly in subsequent print requests.)

Thanks,
i'll look into the XCALL MIAMEX 120 function. and email my little screen shot program it may of some use. It does enough to keep our user happy......so far.

I'm not sure if this will solve your problem, but we have a utility called PRINTKEY, which is Freeware, that we have used for years to print and/or capture screens to disk. It is very functional and feature rich, simple to use, and we've been using it with A-Shell screens for a couple of years now.

You can add it to the System tray on your PC or just press the PRINT SCREEN key.

It will print to the default printer or you can select any printer at time of printing.

Hope this helps ...

I'll hunt around and download it to see whats its like. Sounds a bit more advanced then the little prog what I wrote. But there again is doing the trick.

Thanks.