Printing a screendump

["Gary S. Moss", VLD/VMB]

< This should be a fairly straightforward task.  How do you generate and print
< a screendump (rasterfile)?  We have both imagen and Postscript printers and
< printing to either would be fine.  Thanks in advance.
< 
< 	Stuart Crawford
Stuart,
	I agree it should be fairly straightforward, but saying that could
get you in trouble with Murphy.  I assume that you are running 4Sight, so
look on page N5-28 (section 5.2 of the 4Sight User's Guide version 2.0) and
there are both the 'writecanvas' and 'writescreen' PostScript procedures.
The example that they give for dumping the whole screen is:

framebuffer setcanvas (/tmp/snap) writescreen

Where /tmp/snap is the absolute path name of the output file.  Feeding this
to 'psh' gave me a 'timeout' error, but I got a file of 3617400 bytes.  I'm
not sure if any utilities exist for using this format file; it just says that
it is a rasterfile.

Also, there is a utility called 'scrsave' in /usr/NeWS/bin that will save
all or part of the screen in an SGI image format suitable for display with
the 'readcanvas' PostScript procedure on page N5-22.  I tried saving the
entire screen and got a file of 620279 bytes.  I fed it to my ScreenLock
program, which takes an optional image file name, and it looked correct.

I don't know off-hand if any converters or NeWS/PostScript procedures exist
to produce a PostScript file from one of these formats, but that would be the
logical next step.  If no one else comes up with something, I will start
hunting through the documentation and NeWS directories again, it's starting
to become a bad habit though.  I also don't know if the formats of these
files are documented, but that would certainly be helpful.

Please keep me posted, I could also make use of such a capability.

-moss