Print screen - Definition and Overview

The Print Screen on a computer keyboard is used to copy the content of the screen to memory. This already worked for text in the pre-Windows MS-DOS days, and in modern operating systems with a graphical user interface serves to copy the whole bitmap of the screen to memory. Depending on the arrangement of the operating system output, DOS systems could be made to literally send the screen contents to the printer.

On Microsoft Windows, Print Screen copies the whole screen to memory, except for the mouse pointer, and Print Screen with Alt copies the current active window only. For some uses this choice may be too limited, so special screen capture programs are used.

Note that Print Screen on Windows copies the bitmap exactly, including the aliasing of the fonts. That means that fonts in standard anti-aliasing or ClearType will appear as such when pasted into the paint program and saved, containing more colours than aliased text. The user may therefore want to cancel anti-aliasing for the screen capture job.

Example Usage of screen