garnett@rpp386.cactus.org (John Garnett) (11/22/89)
Hello AIX'ers, I would like to be able press the print screen key on my AIX PS/2 or AIX/RT keyboard and have the contents of the screen dumped to the default print queue (or to a user defined print queue - specified by an environment variable). Currently, this feature is available in AIX only if the application one is running happens to support print screen (such as WHIP). Most AIX programs (in particular telnet) do not implement print-screen. Needless to say, pressing print-screen from the shell prompt merely produces the escape sequence generated by the print-screen key. I've had a few thoughts on how this might be accomplished: 1) write a device driver that polls for the print screen key and dumps the contents of the memory segment that corresponds to the on screen text when the print screen key is pressed. To all of you who may have written AIX device drivers in the past - how tough would this be to do? Rather than dumping screen memory, perhaps I could interface with the hft display driver in some fashion? I assume that the hft driver saves the contents of the screen since the alt-action key sequence switches among virtual sessions (converting a non-displayed session into the active displayed session). 2) use X-Windows and write a client that reads and dumps the contents of a user-selected window. I've seen programs that can dump windows as graphics (such as xwps3) but I really just want the data in ascii character format. Is this possible? 3) modify the xterm sources that come with AIX PS/2 X Examples so that it responds to the print-screen key. Has anyone already done this? I'm really looking for how to do #1, but ideas on #'s 2 and 3 will help. Thanks for any information, John Garnett -- +------------------------------------+-----------------------------------+ | John Garnett | Base 1.9 | | garnett@rpp386.cactus.org | | | {bigtex|texbell}!rpp386!garnett | "It's almost binary" |
root@blender.UUCP (Herb Peyerl) (11/27/89)
I have the VRM Technical Reference manual for my RT and within it there's
quite a good section on device drivers. It supplies function calls,
methods for installation into the VRM, and some examples.
I'm just flipping through it right now and there's a whole section on
using the HFT display structures, etc... There is also a set of
examples on the release diskettes that do various things. ie:
query a location on the screen, turn the keyboard lights on and
off, display mouse input, etc...
I would really suggest picking up the VRM Tech Ref Manual. The number
of it is 59x9093. However, I'm not sure if it's printed anymore since
it came with the original version of AIX for my machine and the release
of that version was 1.0 B47 (which I imagine to be Beta#47). I notice
they don't provide the AIX Technical Reference manual anymore either.
It's really sad since those two manuals are by far the most important
manuals in the whole set, for myself anyway.
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