Category : Pascal Source Code
Archive   : PSCREEN.ZIP
Filename : PSCREEN.DOC

PSCREEN - Utility for saving and displaying packed windows
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Brian Foley
TurboPower Software
11/88
Version 5.02
Released to the public domain

Overview
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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
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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 ,
then move the cursor to the bottom right corner and press 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 . If you want to unload PSCREEN from memory, press
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 when prompted
for a filename, or cancel the operation by pressing .

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
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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.