Although Windows offers a variety of ways to capture a picture of the screen, A-shell includes an integrated screen picture utility, which is available at most input prompts, and which is often much faster and more efficient to use. The pictures are text-only, but this has the advantage of making them small, quick to print, and easy to edit or import into other contexts. It is also possible to create a log of screen snapshots and refer back to them at will, with or without printing them.

To take a screen picture, from most application contexts, just press Ctrl+P. Unless your application is in a context where it is not able to process the Ctrl+P command, this pop up a dialog box that looks something like this:

Display Screen Buffer?

Printer to Print Capture To:

Delete Capture File after Printing?

Comment:

You can abort from this dialog by hitting the ESC key.

The Display Screen Buffer first prompt gives you the option of examining the accumulated screen picture log. (Whether or not there are more than one snapshot available will depend on whether you used the Delete after Printing option at the time of the previous screen snapshot.)

The Printer prompt allows you to specify a printer. Note that you can put in a non-existent printer if you don’t want to really print it. Under A-Shell/Windows, you can also use the pseudo-printer PROMPT, which will present the Windows select-printer dialog, from which you could always cancel.

The Delete after Printing option is self-explanatory. If you answer negatively, your next screen snapshot will be appended to the current snapshot file, allowing you to accumulate as many as you like. (This can be handy for documenting sessions for training, documentation, or other review purposes.)

The Comment option allows you to add a comment to the bottom of the screen snapshot. This can be very helpful to the person later looking at the snapshot, wondering why you took it.

Notes

If the PRINTER setting in miame.ini specifies a second printer name (e.g. PRINTER=p1,p2) then that printer (p2 in this example) will be automatically used as the printer for the screen snapshot, and the pop-up dialog above will skip over the first two questions. If it also specifies the "NODLG" option (e.g. PRINTER=p1,p2,NODLG) then the snapshot will be sent to the printer without the dialog above even appearing. Either of these options is useful when you want to simplify and/or standardize handling of screen snapshots, for example, using them strictly for reporting problems. (In that case, the ideal would be to have your snapshot printer actually email the snapshot to your support provider.)

The Ctrl+P command is actually only processed by the INFLD (aka INPUT) subroutine. This routine is used internally by the vast majority of input routines (including the dot prompt, memos, and field-level data entry) but there may be applications or application situations that do not use it. To obtain screen pictures in such situations, either consult your application provider or use one of the Windows-based methods (assuming you are using a Windows workstation.)

The screen picture file will be named <jobname>.buf and will be stored in the special directory MEM0:[1,1] if it exists, else the current login directory. You might want to erase these files nightly to avoid the situation where someone wants to print just a single screen picture but instead gets many pages of pictures taken during prior days that were printed without the delete option.