scripts or visual basic or perl ?

[jchoy]

I am a MVS old-timer programmer trying to catch up with the rest of this world progressing like snails. One of the most difficult tasks for me to follow is, people left and right just come and click this and that on my NT screen and work or from the web applications we have and I usually just try very hard to tell them to stop and let me navigate my way with print screen key and paste screen by screen to MS word...so I ended up missing most of the training from the young project leader with peer pressure of get up-to-speed with everything.

I want to do this very much, for myself to prove that I still have life in programming in PC and also save myself a lot of clicking and pointing.

I want to launch/run a program that can be minimized and turned on everytime I want to do the print screen key and paste the screen onto word, with just one key stroke so I won't lose any valuable screens and concentration while I am learning from my super project leader. That is just press a key every time the screen changes and it will invoke my program to execute the print screen key in Windows NT/98/2000 and invoke word edit to paste and append to a document so that at the end of my demo, all I need to do is save and print the document which will capture all the screens of my demo in windows.

This sort of programming is easy to do on MVS but I haven't a clue where to start in NT. Is it NT script, dos batch file ? I think visual basic will be overkill at my level since I will need at least a month to finish another Visual basic beginner's book.

Any help would be appreciated as to how I should tackle this. Of course a skeleton of a sample NT script would be great. But any idea what language, can perl do this, I don't think so since this is BillGate's os. If this can be done very easily in NT script, I have tons of other applications in mind that I can carry on based on this one.

[christo418]

Are you meaning that you are trying to do a screen capture? If you are, then you don't need to know any programming, only keyboard shortcuts. Here goes (this works on one screen at a time):
Alt + PrntScrn
(open Notepad or Word)
Ctrl + V

[jchoy]

Hi Christo, no. I mean as my energetic project leader show me the screen, I just want to capture whatever the current screen with just the print screen key once ! i.e. no flipping back and forth between word and the current screen.. I am working on it in 2 phases. Phase 1: record a macro in word to insert new page and paste and define a ctl+s key called screen_print edit macro. It should save a few key strokes but still have to flip between print screen key and word and hit ctl+s. Phase 2 is write a window NT script or something to run the word macro in the background without flipping to it. I am not sure how to have this program running constantly waiting for the print screen key to be pressed in NT. The edit macro is the way to go and I tried it by itself, it works. This would be a wonderful step forthward for me MVS old-timer.....can you talk to your smart NT friends and ask them for answers ? Thanks for you response. I think I should paste this on VB forum too.

[christo418]

Okay, I have a little clearer picture of what you are trying to accomplish. Absolutely post in VB forums (I'm sure that it's a simple script). I'll ask a friend of mine at school about this. Sorry I couldn't help.

[HackinCowboy]

You need to find a way to store the print screens on the fly. Sounds a little difficult, but not impossible. Just listen to all the keystrokes and capture the Print Screen. You can use API calls to control outside applications. You could send keystrokes to programs like Word or Paint to save the screen shots.