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- PSCREEN - Utility for saving and displaying packed windows
- ----------------------------------------------------------
- Brian Foley
- TurboPower Software
- 11/88
- Version 5.02
- Released to the public domain
-
- Overview
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- PSCREEN is a utility program designed to be used in conjunction with the TPCRT
- unit in Turbo Professional 5.0. It operates in either of two modes. In
- resident mode, PSCREEN allows you to capture text screens, video attributes
- and all, in a packed format and save them to disk. In non-resident mode,
- PSCREEN allows you to display a packed window that has previously been saved
- to a file. This facility can be used to create colorful batch files, for
- example.
-
- Using PSCREEN
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- To run PSCREEN in resident mode, simply enter
-
- PSCREEN
-
- at the DOS prompt, with no parameters. When you want to save a packed window
- to disk, press the PSCREEN hotkey, Ctrl-LeftShift-P. The cursor will then
- change to a blinking block.
-
- To select the region of the screen (that is, the 'window') that you want to
- save, move the cursor to the top left corner of the region and press <Enter>,
- then move the cursor to the bottom right corner and press <Enter> again. As
- you move the cursor around, the currently selected portion of the screen will
- be repainted to indicate the bounds of the window. If you want to cancel the
- operation, press <Esc>. If you want to unload PSCREEN from memory, press
- <AltU> instead.
-
- Once you've selected a window, you'll be asked to enter the name of the file
- to save it in. Again, you can unload PSCREEN by pressing <AltU> when prompted
- for a filename, or cancel the operation by pressing <Esc>.
-
- To display a packed screen using PSCREEN, enter
-
- PSCREEN filename.ext
-
- at the DOS prompt. PSCREEN will simply display the contents of the file and
- terminate. It will not attempt to go resident.
-
- Possible Enhancements
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- PSCREEN in its current form has much room for improvement. The following
- describes some missing capabilities that you might want to implement yourself:
-
- (1) PSCREEN cannot display packed windows stored in LBR files, nor can it save
- screens to an LBR file. Adding this capability would be relatively easy,
- however, since TPCRT contains all the primitive routines that are needed:
- OpenLibrary, ReadWindowFromLibrary, CreateLibrary, AddWindowToLibrary, and
- CloseLibrary.
-
- (2) PSCREEN does not perform color mapping when it displays a packed window
- from a file. You might want to add a command line option like '/M' to request
- that colors be mapped if necessary, using MapPackedWindowColors, before the
- screen is displayed.