Topic: Capturing PRINT key

I'd like a webpage to change its content when the user presses the PRINT key to take a screenshot... Do IE/FF's JS implementations allow capturing that key (as I think there is no ASCII code associated to it)?

Being a native feature I doubted it is possible.
I just double checked and, indeed no keyPress event gets fired when you press PrintScreen.

Seriously why would want to do that anyway ? if it is to prevent people from taking screenshot, it's useless. One can use IRFanView or any of the 300 billions tools out there to take screenshots.

or toggle the image on and off rapidly. you could get the 'screen capture' available time down to 50% or something

(Edited by Tyberius Prime on 04-17-2007 13:56)

Ah ha, but then you'd just get people taking photos of the screen.


___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

but they'd still fail 50% of the time

<blink> Disable JS and maybe also CSS and say hello happy images. </blink>



(Edited by poi on 04-17-2007 19:49)

hm, seems I forgot hit submit for the reply I typed earlier

But the first word was "lol", I think

What I'm trying to do is to make it just somewhat harder to take screenshots, copy text to the clipboard, print the page, etc. Nothing I would do with a 'real' web site, but this is going to be a sort of survey taking web app that's mostly used internally and people shouldn't be able to just take the questions with them and share them with others without any kind of effort.

I might just overwrite the clipboard's content with a message like "Your clipboard has been disabled for the duration of the survey", and do that once every tenth of a second......

I know I won't stop anyone who really wants to capture the pages, but - that's okay.

you could do it in flash...

edit: At least it would stop text copy&pasting, you might be able to capture the print key when your flash is the active window, and hide the question when it isn't - similar to how some games pause when you tab out of the browser...

(Edited by Tyberius Prime on 04-18-2007 01:50)

quote:

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Tyberius Prime said:

but they'd still fail 50% of the time

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Ah, but that assumes that a camera shutter operates instantaneously, like a keypress. In reality, though, all you would need to do is make sure that the shutter speed is slow enough to capture the image.

OK, I'll stop now. Best of luck, kuckus.

kuckus: I think the only way is to log in the users with an account with very restricted privileges ( is it possible to prevent a user from using the clipboard at all, to save anything on disk, to block ? ). Otherwise, it's just too easy to counter any attempt you may make. How would you prevent anyone from doing 'File > Save page', or 'View Source', 'Send link', ...


TP: I think it's the browser themselves who stop the plugins when another tab gets focus. At least Opera does that.

poi: true, available data does not allow me to distinguish the two theories: I only use opera