Logging in screen

[jan]

I am trying to do something that I can't quite get my head around; I 
hope that somebody with more experience can help me.

This is what I try to do: I have a large number of serial ports attached 
to one of my linux boxes - I use them as consoles for the other UNIXes, 
which seems to work fine with minicom. I have set it up so I have a 
number of screen sessions start up in detached mode, each running a 
minicom connected to a serial port; this is not complicated, if a little 
fiddly.

Minicom runs an initialisation script through 'expect' - the script 
captures the log on prompt from the server at the other end, extracts 
the server name and saves in a file; I use this to correlate the screen 
sessions with server names.

What I want to achieve is the following:

1: I want to turn on logging in screen, but not until after minicom's 
expect script has run - otherwise the server's output seems to get 
caught in the screen log and not in the expect script. I have tried to 
achieve this by getting the script to send a "^A:", but this just goes 
straight to the serial line. Is there another way?

2: I also want to avoid logging the screen formatting codes - is there a 
way to achieve this?

I suppose I could find a way around both issues, eventually, but it 
would be nice not to have to.

/jan