Printing Multiple PC5250 Screens at the Same Time
October 27, 2010 Hey, Joe
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I print a lot of PC5250 screens but since they only print one page at a time, I have a problem tracking the printouts. The screens are sent to a copier 50 feet away, and they sometimes get collected with other people’s output. How can I print and retrieve all my print screens at the same time? –Bill Check out a cool little PC5250 feature called Print Screen Collection, which should do most of what you’re looking for. Print Screen Collection allows you to capture a number of screens to memory and then print them out as a stack of screens rather than as individual screens. Here’s how you can put it to work right away. When you’re on a screen that you want to print, click on File→Print Screen Collection→Collect Screen. This will take a copy of your current screen and put into the buffer on your PC. When you find another screen you want to print, click File→Print Screen Collection→Collect Screen a second time and that screen will be appended to the buffer after your first screen. Keep adding as many screens as you need, until you’re ready to print or until your buffer is full. When you’re ready to print the collected screens, click on File→Print Screen Collection→Print Collection. PC5250 will send your entire set of collected screens down to your default PC5250 printer as a single stack of screens. By doing this, you can avoid printing onesie and twosie screen shots and just print all your screen shots together. Here’s what your PC5250 screen looks like when you click File→Print Screen Collection from the PC5250 menu bar to open the Print Screen Collection option.
After printing a collection, you may need to select the File→Print Screen Collection→Purge Collection option to clear the selected screens out of the buffer so that you can start a new collection of screens to print. Most times, PC5250 will clear the buffer for you after printing, but this is the option to use if you want to clear the buffer manually. Also notice the Print Collection on Exit option on the Print Screen Collection menu. If you just want to collect your screens and not bother printing them until you’re finished running your PC5250 session, check the Print Collection on Exit option and you won’t even have to click on the Print Collection option to get your screens printed. All collected screens will automatically be printed as you exit your PC5250 session. If you’re going to use these options, you may want to consider assigning them to specific keystroke combinations by using the PC5250 Customize Keyboard option. Customize Keyboard allows you to assign PC5250 functions to different keystroke combinations. For example, you can assign the Collect Screen function to ALT-C on your PC5250 keyboard, the Print Collection function can be assigned to ALT-P, and Purge Collection can then be assigned to ALT-U. This way you can easily collect, print, and purge screens by using your keyboard instead of your mouse to navigate the PC5250 menu bar. You can start checking out the Customize Keyboard feature by clicking Edit→Preferences→Keyboard from the PC5250 menu bar. This will take you to the following key mapping screen.
Click on the Customize button and it will take you into the Customize Keyboard screen for your keyboard file. There you can assign your Print Collection Screen functions to different PC5250 key stroke combinations. Depending on the print drivers you have installed on your screen, you can also send print screen collections to different programs or devices. To do that, click on File→Printer Setup from the PC5250 menu bar. This will bring you to the following screen where you can select the default printer you’re your PC5250 session.
In my case, I changed the default PC5250 printer to Microsoft OneNote and the screens were automatically sent to that program. So if you have a fax printer, a PDF print driver, or another type of special print driver, you can automatically push your screen collection to the function that your driver is attached to just by changing PC5250’s default printer setting. But you need to understand that unlike other programs, the PC5250 default printer isn’t necessarily the same printer as the Windows Default Printer. If you uncheck the Use Windows Default Printer check box on this screen, you can easily set your PC5250 default printer to a different default printer from your Windows desktop. So if you wish, you can set up your Windows printer to go to a nearby paper copier while sending PC5250 print screens to a fax machine or another device. HTH –Joe
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