How Do I Email a PC5250 Screen Shot?

I want to email a PC5250 screen shot. But when I press the Print Screen key, nothing happens. It doesn’t copy my screen to the Windows clipboard and I can’t paste it into my email. What am I doing wrong? I’m using the PC5250 product that comes with iSeries Access V5R4M0.

–Jay

By default, most Windows programs capture your entire desktop display image to the Windows clipboard when you press the PRT key (on some keyboards, you press the PrtSc key, instead). PRT copies the entire desktop image to the clipboard, including all visible Windows and the Windows toolbar.

Alternatively, you can capture only the current active window on your desktop (the window that you’re currently working in) to your clipboard by pressing ALT + PRT.

Once you’ve copied the screen shot to the clipboard, it’s easy to paste it into an email, a Word document, or any other document by using the program’s Paste function or by pressing CTRL + V.

The problem with the PC5250 PRT function is that PC5250 has its own customized keyboard map that overrides the default Windows copy settings for PRT and ALT + PRT. If your screen capture function isn’t working, it’s easy to check and modify the keystroke setting for PRT and ALT + PRT. Here’s how you can do it.

Inside PC5250, select Edit→Preferences→Keyboard from the menu bar. This will bring up the following keyboard selection screen.

Your customized keyboard map name and location is listed in the Keyboard-File Name: input box. To change your keyboard mapping file, click on the Customize button on this screen. This will bring you to this Customize Keyboard screen.

On this screen, you can assign the following default keystroke values for each key on your keyboard.

• Base–The action that’s performed when you press the key by itself (PRT, in our case)
• Shift–The action that’s performed when you press and hold the Shift key followed by tapping the target key (SHIFT + PRT)
• Ctrl–The action that’s performed when you press and hold one of the CTRL keys followed by tapping the key (CTRL + PRT)
• Alt–The action taken when you hold down one of the ALT keys followed by the key (ALT + PRT)

In addition, the Configure PC5250 keyboard screen is divided into three areas that can be used to change PC5250’s default keystroke combinations.

1. The Select a Key area, where you select the key that you want to modify your keystroke combinations for.
2. The Select a Key-Action area, where you select the key action that you want to assign to one of the key’s different keystroke combinations.
3. The Change Current Actions for Selected Key area, where you assign the selected key action to one or more of the key’s keystroke combinations.

You can view your current PRT keystroke actions by clicking on the PRT key button in the Select a Key Area. The current actions assigned to each PRT key state are then shown in the Change Current Actions for Selected Key area, as shown above. Notice that the default Base and the Alt actions for the PRT key are both set to [pass]. This means that your PC5250 keyboard will not perform any actions when either of those keystroke combinations is selected.

If you want to change your PC5250 PRT and ALT + PRT keys to match the Windows default values for capturing screen shots, perform the following actions.

1. With the PRT settings showing in the Change Current Actions for Selected Key area, click on the Function dropdown box in the Select a Key Action area. This will bring up a list of possible actions that you can define for the keystroke combinations PC5250 assigns to the PRT key.

2. Scroll down the Function list until you find the Print Screen entry. Highlight that entry and click on the right arrow button (→) on the Base line in the Change Current Actions for Selected Key area. This will change the value for the base setting of PRT to [local copy]. [local copy] simply means that when PRT is pressed within PC5250, it will copy all visible windows on the entire desktop to the Windows clipboard.

3. Open the Function dropdown list again and this time, select the Print Graphics entry. With Print Graphics highlighted, click on the right arrow (→) on the Alt line in the Change Current Actions for Selected Key area. This will change the value for the ALT + PRT keystroke combination to [print graphics]. [print graphics] tells PC5250 to copy only the current PC5250 screen to the Windows clipboard when the ALT + PRT combination is pressed.

4. After performing steps 1 through 3, your keystroke combination actions for the PRT key should look like this screen.

5. Save your modified customized keyboard by selecting File→Save option followed by the File→Exit option from the Customize Keyboard menu bar. When you return to the Keyboard Selection screen, click on the OK button to reset the PC5250 keyboard to your newly configured keyboard.

After performing this configuration, you’ll be able to copy your PC5250 screens to any other Windows program just by using the PRT and ALT + PRT keystrokes. Your screen copies should work exactly as they do when capturing screen shots from any other Windows program.

–Joe

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