Print button

Key press on a US 102-key keyboard circled in red

The print key , in Switzerland the print screen key, is a key found on most PC keyboards. For German and Austrian keyboards, the label is “Druck” or “Print”, for Swiss and US keyboards “Print Screen”, “Prt Sc” or similar. Since the introduction of the MF2 keyboard in 1987 (with the exception of notebooks) it has been an independent key; on the first PCs, the same function was achieved using the key combination Shift- *or Shift- ×(multiplication symbol on the numeric keypad).

function

Under MS-DOS , the key was originally used to create a simple hard copy of the currently displayed screen content on the connected printer , regardless of the software currently running . This meant that information could be printed out even if the current program did not offer its own print function.

Under Microsoft Windows , as well as various Linux surfaces such as KDE and Gnome , which is activated by pressing Druckor - Print Screenbutton a screenshot (screenshot) in the bitmap created format and the clipboard copied. This screenshot is then available for saving or editing.

Taking a screenshot using the print button does not work under Windows in the following situations:

If a program is currently busy, it waits until the program reacts again. Software that can take screenshots ignores this.
Screenshots from 256-color programs (usually games) are almost completely black. However, some of these games have a built-in screenshot function.
With video overlay technology, the graphics card is told that a certain color should be replaced by a video in a certain area of the screen. When taking a screenshot, only this uniformly colored area is recorded and saved by the graphics program, although it continues to display the moving image. In the past, video overlays were used to reduce the CPU load on TV cards, but were mostly abolished with Windows Vista. However, the process and the problems that come with it are intentionally used by Blu-ray software as copy protection.

Buttons on a IBM / Windows - Keyboard ( German / Austrian occupation "T1")
Esc	F1	F2	F3	F4	F5	F6	F7	F8	F9	F10	F11	F12	Print S-Dep	roll	pause break	Numeric keypad :

													Insert	Pos1	Image ↑	Num	/	*	-
													Dist	The End	Image ↓	7th	8th	9	+
																4th	5	6th	+
														↑		1	2	3	Enter
													←	↓	→	0		,	Enter