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Star Micronics NX-10 User's Manual

1. OD OA 5 Notice that your printer is receiving decimal code 13 hex 0D is coming with hex 0A which is really decimal 10 In addition your printer does not receive decimal code 26 hex 1A Your printer prints hex numbers 16 per line with printing the characters on the right side If it receives less than 16 it sits ina holding pattern awaiting more data Taking the printer off line 80 dumps the characters to the paper To debug a program quickly just use the hex dump capabili ty Appendix B will help you translate the hex codes to ASCII equivalents CHAPTER 6 CREATING YOUR OWN CHARACTERS Subjects we ll cover in Chapter 6 include e Designing and printing your own characters e Designing proportional characters e Designing your own characters with NLQ In the previous chapters of this manual you ve learned how to control the printer to give dozens of different typefaces By us ing various combinations of pitches character weights and font selections you can create nearly any effect you want to in text And with international character sets and the special text and big characters described in Chapter 5 you can print almost any character you think of But if almost any character isn t good enough for you then it s a good idea you have this printer With it you can actually create your own characters As you ll see in this chapter download characters can be us
2. 4 4 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 Sum 103 58 255 Figure 6 7 By adding the values of each dot in a column you ll get a unique description for any combination of dots 87 So add up the values of the dots in each column using this system In Figure 6 8 we ve shown our grid with the sums of the columns filled in across the bottom see if these agree with your answers Across the top of the grid you ve probably noticed the cryptic labeling of each column m1 m2 m3 etc These labels correspond to the labels in the command syntax state ment which we ll get to shortly m m Mm m M M M M M Ma M ASCII Code Descender Start column End column M Descende 128 Start 16 End Figure 6 8 Add the values of the dots in each column and write the sum of each column at the bottom Assigning a value to your character We ve done a pretty through job of designing and describing a user defined character But this printer has room for 96 download characters how does it knows which standard character we want to print every character is assigned a unique number The standard characters are assigned the ASCII codes numbers from 0 to 255 For the download character sets you can also define any positions between 0 to 225 This means that once a character is defined and assigned a value and the download character set is selected you
3. Control code ESC 0 ESC y 1 ESC 2 ESC A CHR n ESC 3 CHRS n ESC FT CHR n ESC CHR n Function Set line spacing to 1 8 inch Set line spacing to 7 72 inch Set line spacing to 1 6 inch or use ESC A definition Set or define line spacing to n 72 inc Set line spacing to 7 216 inch One time line feed of 7 216 inc One time reverse line feed of 2 216 inc N Moving down the page without a carriage return So far all the commands that move the paper also move the print head to the left margin And normally this is what you want Sometimes though you may wish to move down the page without moving the printhead back to the left margin The following commands do just that The ESC J CHR n command causes the printer to make one line feed of 2 216 inch but does not change the setting of the line spacing Try this program to see how it works 10 Demo of one time line feeds 20 LPRINT LINE NUMBER 1 30 LPRINT LINE NUMBER 2 40 One time line feed 50 LPRINT CHR 27 3 J 3CHR 100 60 LPRINT LINE NUMBER act 7O LPRINT LINE NUMBER 4 80 END Here is what your printer will produce LINE NUMBER 1 LINE NUMBER 2 LINE NUMBER 3 LINE NUMBER 4 The ESC J CHR 100 in line 50 changes the spacing to 100 216 inches for one line only without moving the printhead The rest of the lines printed with the normal line spacing Notice that b
4. Figure 6 9 Character designs for the three graph symbols 89 Download character definition command You ve read through a long explanation of download characters and we haven t even told you the command syntax yet Now the wait is over This is the most complex command in your printer repertoire and now you ve got the necessary knowledge to implement it Here it is ESC amp CHR 0 n1 n2 mO m1 m2 m3 m4 m5 m6 m7 m8 9 mlo mil Like the other printer s commands it starts with an ESC CHR 27 The next character is an ampersand amp CHR 38 followed by a CHR 0 nl and n2 are used to specify the ASCII values of the characters you are defining The reason that there are two bytes reserved for this is that your printer allows you to define many characters with just a single command n1 is used to specify the beginning of a range of characters to be defined 2 specifies the end of the range For instance if you wanted to change the ap pearance of the numerals from 0 to 9 which have ASCII codes 48 through 57 the command would begin with ESC amp CHR 0 CHR 48 CHR 57 Of course you can also define individual characters by making n1 and n2 equal moO is called the attribute byte for it describes two attributes of the character we have designed descender data and propor tional width information A byte consists of eight bits In the at tribute byte the first high order b
5. 121 E 9 pin graphics mode In the early part of this chapter we said that the bottom pin of the print head is not normally used in the graphics modes That s because most computers communicate with parallel type peripheral devices using eight data lines When the peripheral is a printer each data line corresponds to one pin on the print head Thus each byte sent will fire up to eight pins But the printer has 9 pins available So how do you fire the ninth pin with only 8 data lines In fact do you really want to bother with just one extra pin Well for such graphics intensive applications as screen dumps printing 9 pins at a time can speed up the process considerably For this purpose your printer has a special 9 pin graphics mode it won t however work with 7 bit interface systems In this mode the printer takes 2 bytes to fire all 9 pins as shown in Figure 7 3 See T 128 O 64 O 32 O 16 First byte OJ 8 O 4 01 2 O 1 5 128 Second byte only the top bit is used Figure 7 3 Your printer takes 2 bytes to fire all 9 pins in case of the 9 pin graphics mode In addition you can select the print density by the value of 0 When 20 is 0 the normal density is selected and when 0 is 1 the double density is selected Since computers are faster than printers there is no signifi cant time loss in printing a single line of graphics with 9 pins You get 9 dots per line in about the same time
6. 350 GOSUB 400 360 NEXT I 370 RETURN HOO 30 Subroutine to plot a point at X1 Y1l 420 430 XX X1 LXFAC YY Y1 LYFAC HUQ COLZ INT XX 1 450 ROWZ INT YY 6 h60 XITZ INT YY ROWZ 6 1 470 BIT COL ROW BIT COL Z ROW Z OR MASKZ XITZ 480 RETURN 600 7 610 Subroutine to plot a circle 620 630 RAD 9 640 X1 19 Y1 10 650 FOR ANG 0 TO 360 STEP 10 111 660 RANG ANG 6 0 670 X2 RAD COS RANG 10 Y2 RAD SIN RANG 10 680 GOSUB 250 690 NEXT ANGZ 700 RETURN If you are using with the IBM mode DIP switch 1 6 off change the following lines to the program given above 140 LPRINT CHR 27 A CHR 6 CHR 27 2 230 LPRINT CHRE 27 5 A 3CHRS 12 15 E How the program works In the program above we ve created an array called BIT which is dimensioned in line 40 You ll note that instead of using numeric constants to dimension the array we used the variables MAXCOL and MAXROW This way if your computer has enough memory and you want to plot a larger image all you need to change are the values in line 30 The array MASK con tains the values of the dots In order to make this program run on most computers we re only six pins for graphics With many computers you can use all eight available pins In lines 80 and 90 we ve defined some other variables you ll be interested in LX LXFAC LY and LYFAC are used as scaling factors By changing these values you can change the size
7. Print slash zero Print normal zero ESC 1 Immediate print off ESC 10 E Backspace delete and cancel text Backspace CHR 8 backs up the printhead so that you can print two characters right on top of each other Each time your printer receives a backspace it moves the printhead one character to the left instead of to the right You can strike over multiple letters by sending more than one backspace code Delete CHR 127 also backs up one character but then it erases the previous character it s erased from your printer s buffer not from the paper Cancel text CHR 24 deletes all the text in the print buffer that is in the line before the delete text command Since your printer prints one line of text at a time only that line will be deleted The following program shows how these codes works 10 LPRINT BACKSPACE DOES NOT 20 LPRINT CHR 8 CHR 8 CHR 8 30 LPRINT WORK HO LPRINT DELETE DOES NOT 50 LPRINT CHR 127 CHR 127 CHR 127 64 60 LPRINT WORK 70 LPRINT CANCEL LINE 80 LPRINT CHR 24 90 LPRINT DOES NOT WORK Here is what this program will print BACKSFACE DOES NBE WORE DELETE DOES WORE DOES NOT WORK The backspace codes in line 20 move the printhead a total of three spaces to the left so that the first part of line 30 will over print the word NOT The delete codes in line 50 erase the three l
8. aama THIS 15 GREAT This will make the sine wave pattern long enough to go off the page As you can see your printer printed graphics up to the end of the line then ignored the rest of the graphics data and returned to normal text on the next line 106 PRINTING A DESIGN OR LOGO Since you control the firing of every pin you can print nearly anything with your printer that can draw and probably better if you re like most computer users You can be used for creating computer art or drawing maps Or as we ll show you here you can use dot graphics to print your logo at the top of each let ter you print Designing an image to print with dot graphics is much like designing download characters The best way to start is to lay out your image on graph paper Since you can print eight rows seven with a 7 bit interface of dots with each pass of the print head draw a heavy horizontal line every eight rows on your graph paper And it may be helpful to write the dot values 128 64 32 etc down the left side of each row Then after you ve filled in the dots that you want to print it s time to get out the old calculator again Just as you did with download characters add up the values of each column of dots this makes up one byte Figure LEN By laying out the logo on graph paper you can calculate all of the graphics data 107 In the program below we ve taken the logo gr
9. 65 in decimal is amp H41 in hex Wl Control codes ASCII codes with values of 32 or less do not have their own keys These codes control many of the printer s functions so we call them control codes To enter a control code from the keyboard we have to press two keys at the same time the control key and one other The other key determines what code is sent pressing the control CTRL key and A sends ASCII code 1 CTRL B sends ASCII code 2 and so on Your printer has a lot of control codes to let you do some real ly nifty things Let s try one that we ve mentioned several times already 10 Demo of ASCII code 20 LPRINT CHR 7 30 END RUN That s the printer s bell we call it that even though it sounds like a buzzer We ll learn more about it in later we just wanted to show you a control code that would get your attention right away There are four common ways of referring to a control code the name of the code or its abbreviation the decimal ASCII value the hexadecimal ASCII value and the CTRL value For example the ASCII code that causes the printer to advance the paper one line is decimal 10 This code may be referred to by any of the following 27 line feed the name of the code LF its abbreviation ASCII 10 its decimal value ASCII amp HOA its hexadecimal value the amp H signifies hex CHR 10 the way it s used in BASIC CTRL J the way you send it
10. A CHR x command in IBM mode only defines the line spacing as 72 of an inch the ESC 2 command changes the line spacing to the amount defined by the previous ESC A So you need to change the following lines to the previous pro gram as shown below for the IBM mode iQ LPRINT CHRS 27 A CHR 1L CHR 27 5 2 5 80 LPRINT CHR 27 A 5 CHR 12 CHR 27 2 You may wonder why they picked 1 72 of an inch as the incre ment for the line spacing command There s a good reason the dots that the printer makes are 1 72 inch apart So this means that you can vary the line spacing in increments as fine as one dot unless you want finer spacing like one third dot spac ing The ESC 3 CHR m command sets the line spacing in in crements of 1 216 inch Change line 40 in your program so it is like this 40 LPRINT CHR 27 3 3 3CHR T 5 and run the program again Now the results will look like this 45 Tu r ey 1 une 115 REA 5 SF 2 BEAL BBE te RE RE ta ae ze REAT pel pe oe 31 Peay 3 g BEAL Ia SE 5 SEAL LS ot 5 SPAC ts Y 2 2 The program works just the same as before but the line spac ing are just one third what they were This is because ESC 3 CHR sets the line spacing to 2 216 inch Table 4 2 shows all the line spacing commands including several shortcut commands for commonly used line spacings Table 4 2 Line spacing commands
11. ESC a CHR 1 Right aligned printing ESC a CHR 2 Try this program to see how easy it is 10 Demo of aligning and centering 20 LPRINT CHR 27 3 1 CHR 20 30 LERINT CHR 27 Q CHR 60 H0 LPRINT CHR 27 a CHR 0 50 LPRINT THIS LINE IS LEFT ALIGNED 60 LPRINT CHR 27 a CHR 1 70 LPRINT THIS LINE IS CENTERED 80 LPRINT CHR 27 a CHR 2 90 LPRINT THIS LINE IS RIGHT ALIGNED When you run this program you should get like this THIS LINE IS LEFT ALIGNED THIS LINE IS CENTERED THIS LINE 15 RIGHT ALTGNED CHAPTER 5 SPECIAL FEATURES OF THE PRINTER Subjects we ll cover in Chapter 5 include e Printer s bell e Master reset e Uni directional printing e International character sets e Printing BIG characters e The optional sheet feeder e Macro instruction e Reading a hex dump In the previous chapters we have learned about several groups of control codes In this chapter we will look at more con trol codes These codes don t fit neatly into any of the groupings that we have studied but they add a lot of capability to your printer So here goes E Now hear this You may have heard the printer s bell if you have ever run out of paper And you may have wondered why it s called a bell when it beeps instead of ringing It s a long story that goes back to the early days of computers when teletype machines were us ed for computer terminals These mechan
12. 0 40 END Voila It should have printed out the three characters we defin ed Your printout should look like this 4 mr If it doesn t check the last program we ran for errors then rerun it Let s find out if there are any other characters in the download RAM Try this program 10 LPRINT Sarr eae CHR 0 20 FOR I 32 TO 126 30 LPRINT CHR I 4Q NEXT I 50 LPRINT 60 FOR I 160 TO 254 70 LPRINT CHR I 80 NEXT I 90 LPRINT 100 LPRINT CHR 27 0 CHR 0 110 END 92 Nope Just three characters in the download set This is incon venient for a couple of reasons First every time you wanted to use a download character you would have to switch back and forth between character sets Knowing that you wouldn t want to do that your printer won t even allow it So we have made it an easy task to use mostly standard characters with just a few special characters thrown in This command copies all the ASCII characters from the standard character ROM into download RAM ESC CHR 0 CHR 0 CHR 0 Since it will copy all characters into download area it will wipe out any characters that are already there So it s important to send this command to the printer before you send any download characters you want to define With that in mind add this line to the program we used to send the characters to your printer 5 LPRINT CHR 27 5 CHR 0 CHR 0 CHR 0 Now try the download printout tes
13. 72 dots per inch each way With this feature you can plot truely round circles without any type of scaling factors COMPATIBILITY WITH EXISTING SOFTWARE With its ability to print seven different graphics densities this printer s graphics abilities are advanced indeed There are many programs in fact that are unable to use this printer s single graphics command ESC for selecting the proper density To maintain compatibility with this software there are individual commands to select each of this printer s common Table 7 3 Alternative graphics commands Single command Individual command ESC CHRS 0 1 n2 ESC K nl n2 ml m2 ml m2 Double ESC CHR 1 r1 n2 ml m2 Double with ESC CHR 2 n1 n2 CESC L n1 n2 m1 m2 CESC Y nl n2 m1 m2 ESC CHR 3 n1 n2 mima 2507 nl n2 m1 m2 CESC CHR 4 nl n2 ml m2 ESC CHR 5 n1 n2 ml m2 ESC CHR 6 n1 n2 ml m2 120 graphics densities These commands which are shown in Table 7 3 can be used interchangeably with the corresponding ESC command Like the commands you are already familiar with these new commands are followed by two bytes to specify the number of graphics data bytes to print and then the data MORE GRAPHICS PROGRAMMING TIPS At the end of this chapter we ll discuss two modes that the printer offers to help you solve po
14. CUA 20823456789 4 gt PCABCDEF BHI IKLMNOPQARSTUUHXYZENI _ abcdefghi jk Inno parstuvwxyzt 7 HSE O 4 2A SE VERE Depa I eri meer ey RETE ve abcdefghiikimno parstuvwxyz i Self test 2 IHSAN K 1 25456789 5 lt gt 7QABCDEFGHI JKLMNOPARSTUVWXYZC 1 _ abcdefghi ikimno REAR O K 701234547897 5 lt gt PHABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPORSTUVWXYZO I _ abcdefghi jikimnop HHL E SDSS abcdefghi ikl HOLS O 125456789 lt gt PBABCDEFGHI JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0 I _ abcdefghi jklmnopaqr SAR K 0123456789t lt gt 71 ABCDEFGHI JK LMNOPOQRSTUVWXYZ0N 1 abcdefghi iklmanopars A Okt OL2 745467893 lt gt 7HABCDEFGHI JKLMNOPORSTUVWXYZE 2 _ Tabcdefgh ikl mnoparst Figure 2 12 The self tests show you what the printer can print Were you surprised It s fast isn t it About 120 characters a second to be exact When you want to terminate the self test function turn off the power switch 19 E Hex dump Can you guess what a hex dump is No it s not where witches throw away useless spells A hex dump is an advanced ability of your printer that you can use in certain cases to find a problem with your system Fortunately such problems rarely arise but the hex dump is available if one does We ll go over hex dump in Chapter 4 Right now we ll just tell you how to make a hex d
15. Horizontal tabs Horizontal tabs are set automatically every eight positions To move the print head to the next tab position send CHR 9 Try this program to see how the default tabs work 10 Demo of horizontal tabbing 20 LPRINT ONE CHR 9 TWO CHR 9 THREE CHR 9 FOUR Here s what you should get ONE TWO THREE FOUR Even though the words are different length they are spaced out evenly by the horizontal tabs Now add the following line to your program to set different horizontal tabs 54 15 LPRINT CER 27 D CHR 7 CHRS 14 CHRS 21 CHR 0 ESC D is the command to begin setting horizontal tabs It must be followed by characters representing the positions that you want the tabs set In our program we are setting tabs in col umns 7 14 and 21 The CHR 0 at the end ends the string of tabs In fact any character that is not greater than the previous one will stop setting tabs This means that you must put all your tab values in order from least to greatest or they won t all get set When you run the program now it produces this ONE TWO THREE FOUR The words are now closer together but still evenly spaced Turn your printer off and on again to reset the default tabs Table 4 7 Horizontal tab commands Advance to next tab position CHR 9 oa One time horizontal tabs Suppose you need to move to a position across the page but you only need
16. Self test 1 is the long version and self test 2 is the short one You can use either one to show the characters available in the printer to check the in stallation of the ribbon and paper and to check the adjustment of the head to platen gap Best of all you don t have to wait another minute you can print the self test without hooking up the printer to your com puter It s as simple as 1 2 3 1 Plug in the printer don t turn it on yet 2 Insert a sheet of paper or sprocket paper either one 3 While holding down one of the following keys turn on the power switch Paper Feed key Self test 1 long On Line key Self test 2 short 0 Self test 1 VOTES HELL O k 01254567891 j lt gt 7 ABCDEFGHI JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZC 1 _ abcdefg hijkl mnaparstuvex yz i Fa eter a earners tay welt t Youd tk Pur 15 TONS 12 2 SPJ F2 JT Wiensto Tatil rye 23 putt sid PEDE TUUHKYZENI4_ abcdefg ra ee piieaaaaceee i 11 AAfZEODOUYOUG 14 ln Wyeast Ye htt eT lun eS seite 1 1 6 03 6 1 15 0 23 B39 3 lt PO RGABCDEFGHTSKLENOPG TUVWXYZ _ abodefg vedere NENE ONE TCU AAC AMAL i AARMESSDGUYOUCEVRE iki OMNA im fn a oe Palo Tr S025 eREN gt po Tet 04 aa pl 1 TOKE NNOROR LS abcdetg IHL O kt 0123454789 gt lt ABCDEFGHI JKLMNOPQORSTUVWXYZC 1 _ abcdet ghi ikl mno parstuvwsyz i LOMETE
17. 6 2 As the printhead moves across the page each of the wires prints one row of dots THE PRINT MATRIX All of the standard characters that this printer prints are form ed from patterns of dots that are permanently stored in the printer s ROM read only memory This includes all of the stan dard ASCII characters and special characters the international 83 character sets and the NLQ characters But there is another area of memory in this printer reserved for user defined characters These are characters that you can design and download into the printer When download characters are defined they are stored in RAM random access memory which allows you to define or modify them at any time Each of these characters whether it is from the standard character ROM or in download RAM is constructed on a grid which is six boxes by nine boxes high In addition a dot can straddle any of the vertical lines As an example take a look at the enlarged 9 superimposed on the grid in Figure 6 3 As you can see some dots are inside the bexes and some are centered on the vertical lines This in effect makes the character grid 11 dots wide by 9 dots high To see how the rest of the characters in the standard character ROM are constructed take a look at Appendix C _ Figure 6 3 Dots can be inside boxes or straddle the vertical lines of the grid DEFINING YOUR OWN CHARACTERS You ve seen
18. CHR 27 CHR 0 60 PRINT 1 CHR WID MOD 256 70 PRINT 1 CHR INT WID 256 80 FOR I 0 TO WID 1 90 J 1 SIN 1I PI 32 100 PRINT 1 CHR 2 INT J 3 5 5 5 110 NEXT I 120 LPRINT 130 CLOSE 1 In lines 50 to 70 we ve selected normal density graphics and said that 100 characters of graphics data would follow The loop between lines 80 and 110 is repeated to plot 100 points along a curve This is an example of plotting a very simple 105 mathematical function a sine wave to create a design Later in this chapter we ll show something more complex The mathematical concepts such as sine and pi demonstrated here are not important you don t have to be a math whiz to use this printer s graphics E Combining text and graphics It s also possible to mix text and graphics in one line This can be useful for labeling charts or graphs or even inserting fancy graphics in text Try adding these lines to our program 4S PRINT 1 WOW 115 PRINT 1 THIS IS GREAT Now if you run the program you should get a printout that looks like this WO ee TAS 15 GREAT But there is one thing to be careful of all graphics data must print on the same line The graphics command is turned off at the end of each line even if you have specified that more graphics codes follow To see what we mean change line 30 to plot 1000 points and run the program 30 WID 1000 WOW e a ea
19. Calis a x Table 5 7 Big character commands Control code Double high enlarged print ESC h CHR 1 ESC h CHR amp 3 ESC h CHR 0 Try this program to see the big characters 75 10 Demo of BIG characters 20 LPRINT THIS IS 30 LPRINT CHRS 27 h 3 CHRS 1 40 LPRINT DOUBLE 50 LPRINT CHRS 27 h CHR 0 60 LPRINT SIZED PRINTING 70 LPRINT 80 LPRINT THIS IS 90 LPRINT CHRS 27 h CHRS 2 100 LPRINT QUAD 110 LPRINT CHRS 27 h sCHRS 0 120 LPRINT SIZED PRINTING 130 END When you run this program you will get like this THIS I5 GEH 1 SIZED PRINTING THIS 5 8 Lie a 0 SIZED PRINTING As you can see when the big character command is used the baseline for each character does not align When you want to align the baseline try this program 10 Demo of aligning BIG characters 20 LPRINT THIS IS 30 LPRINT CHR 27 j CHR 21 40 LPRINT CHR 27 3 h CHR 1 50 LPRINT DOUBLE 60 LPRINT CHRS 27 h CHRS 0 70 LPRINT CHRS 27 J 3CHRS 18 80 LPRINT SIZED PRINTING 90 LPRINT LPRINT LPRINT 100 LPRINT THIS IS 110 LPRINT CHR 27 3 sCHRS 63 120 LPRINT CHR 27 h CHRS 2 130 LPRINT QUAD 140 LPRINT CHR 27 h CHRS 0 150 LPRINT CHRS 27 J CHRS 63 160 LPRINT SIZED PRINTING 170 LPRINT LPRINT 180 END 76 When you run this program you will get like this
20. all of its letters except NLQ characters in italic as well as the roman standard letters you are accustomed to Italics can be used to give extra emphasis to certain words The command codes to turn italic on and off are shown in Table 3 2 Table 3 2 Italic commands Italic ON ESC 4 Italic OFF ESC 5 Use this program to see italic characters 30 10 Demo of italic and roman 20 LPRINT CHR 27 4 30 LPRINT This line is in ITALIC characters 40 LPRINT CHR 27 3 5 50 LPRINT This line is in ROMAN characters Here is what you should get This fine is in ITALIC characters This line is in ROMAN characters In this program line 20 turns italic on with ESC 4 and line 40 turns italic off with ESC 5 E Underlining Not only can your printer print all styles of printing in both roman and italic but it can underline them too The control codes are shown in Table 3 3 Table 3 3 Underline commands Underline ON ESC 1 Underline OFF ESC 0 Again that s simple Let s try it with this program 10 Demo of underlining 20 LPRINT CHR 27 3 1 30 LPRINT This phrase is UNDERLINED LO LPRINT CHR 27 0 50 DPRING this is not It should come out like this This phrase is UNDERLINED this is not 31 In this program underline is turned on in line 20 with ESC 1 and then off in line 40 with ESC 0 There s a n
21. can use that character on the printer the same way you would any standard character You can send the character with the same ASCII value You can 88 also access the character from a BASIC program with the CHR function There are no rules or restrictions on the use of numbers This means you can use whatever is most convenient for you perhaps seldom used keys can be replaced by more useful characters In our example we ll assign the flask a value of 60 which is the code for the character in the ASCII characters A rather arbitrary selection but this printer doesn t care Our chart would hardly be complete with just a picture of a chemist s flask so in Figure 6 9 we ve made completed grids for some other symbols an automobile and a gun quite a strange mix of characters The information on the grids is now com plete except for proportional width data a more advanced topic we ll take up shortly mm mm mmm m m M M m m m m m mmm M Me m ascito OG ASCII Code b Descender 1 Descender L Start column Siar column 2 End coumn 23 End column 21 va 2 paus 2 toa 274 6 64 16 6 Sal plL 2 4 2 it m m m MM mM MM Ma M M My M fri M mM mmm Mas ASCII Code GL 128 ASCII Code Descender L 64 Descender Start column 32 Start column Ena coumn 21 End column 16 8 4 2 1 wa 462 6 6 Total 3B GU 4F 5 49
22. feed it can doa reverse form feed This code moves the paper so that the print head is positioned at the top of the current page This can be us 48 ed for example to print text in a multi column magazine for mat print the first column then reverse form feed back to the top of the page to start the second column The code for reverse form feed is easy to remember lt ESC gt lt FF gt Table 4 3 Form feed commands Control code Advance paper to top of next CHR 12 page Reverse paper to top of current page E Changing the page length You may have some computer forms that you wish to use with this printer that are not 11 inches high That s no problem because you can tell your printer how high the forms are that you are using There are two commands for doing this shown in this table ESC CHR 12 Table 4 4 Form length control Set the page length to lines ESC C CHR n Set the page length to n inches ESC C CHRS 0 CHR m Let s set up a 7 inch high form length which is typical of many computer checks The following program will do it NEW 10 Demo of variable form lengths 20 LPRINT CHR 27 C CHR 0 CHR 7 30 LPRINT PAY TO THE ORDER OF 40 LPRINT CHR 12 50 LPRINT PAY TO THE ORDER OF 60 END This program should print PAY TO THE ORDER OF twice and they should be 7 inches apart Line 20 sets the form length to 7 inches After line 30 prints
23. from a keyboard Of course most of the time we don t need to bother with these Our computers are smart enough to know that when we press the A key we want to print the letter A they take care of all the intermediate steps Appendix B is a table that shows the various names for each code so you can convert back and forth The microcomputer world is not very consistent in describing ASCII codes so it s important that you have a basic knowledge of them Wl The escape codes Back when the ASCII system was set up computer equip ment was relatively simple and thirty three control codes were considered sufficient at the time The American Standards people realized that eventually more control codes would be needed so they included the escape ESC code to allow almost any number of additional codes to be defined when they became necessary ESC allows us to escape from the ordinary set of control codes so we can specify additional functions and other informa tion needed for a printer function In this manual we ll write the ESC code inside broken brackets like this ESC ESC decimal 27 is always followed by at least one other number it is never used alone The whole series of related numbers is called an escape sequence E A note on command syntax Because the readers of this manual will be running such a wide variety of applications on so many different computers we just can t show the exact
24. in the second or third positions and opened by the printer when the lever is in the bottom position 8 Release lever Paper bail Figure 2 3 Use friction feed for single sheets and tractor feed for continuous paper E Loading single sheets Now instead of feeding the paper in manually by turning the platen knob we re going to use the release lever the printer must be turned on Remember what we told you about this lever It allows you to advance the paper according to its posi tion 12 OK Let s start 1 Move the sprockets on the tractor feed unit all the way to the ends 2 Slide the sheet guide all the way to the right 3 With the ribs of the paper guide toward you and the sliding adjuster at the bottom left insert the guide into the slot at the back of the printer cover po N Sheet guide Sprocket Ss N N Figure 2 4 Raise the paper guide for loading single sheets 4 Insert the guide stand in the notches provided for it and use it to prop up the paper guide 5 Position the adjuster at the triangle marked on the guide for standard margins or set it according to your re quirements 6 Set the release lever for single sheets the second posi tion from the top 7 Align a sheet of paper on the guide along the adjuster 8 Turn on the power switch The Power indicator will blink because there is no paper 13
25. inch us ing the ESC A CHR n command This is so that there are no gaps between rows of dots Then the loop from line 150 to line 220 prints the dot graphics image one line which is six dots high at a time The variable A is used to build a string of all the columns of BIT in a given row As you can see by taking the program in small pieces and analyzing it graphics programming does not have to be dif ficult If you want to try some other plots try these replace lines after 600 with the lines below The printouts from each program are shown below the listing 600 610 Subroutine to plot a star 620 4 630 RAD 9 640 FOR ANG 0 TO 360 STEP 45 650 RANG ANG 3 14159 180 660 RANG2 ANG 135 3 14159 180 670 X1 RAD COS RANG 10 680 Y1 RAD SIN RANG 10 690 X2 RAD COS RANG2 10 700 Y2 RAD SIN RANG2 10 710 GOSUB 250 720 NEXT ANG 730 RETURN 113 600 610 Subroutine to plot a sine wave 620 630 1 0 Y1 10 X2 20 Y2 10 640 GOSUB 250 650 X1 10 Y1 0 X2 10 Y2 20 650 GOSUB 250 670 X1 0 Y1 10 680 FOR X2 0 TO 20 STEP 2 690 Y2 10 9 SIN 3 14159 X2 10 700 GOSUB 250 710 NEXT X2 720 RETURN HIGH RESOLUTION GRAPHICS Up until now all of the dot graphics printing we have done has been with your printer s normal density mode This can give you some pretty sharp images at great speed Sometimes though you may want to create an image with even higher resolution This printer has seven gr
26. of your printer SOME SPECIAL KINDS OF TEXT If you looked carefully at your printer s self test you noticed that it can print in italics But there s more Your printer can underline characters print superscripts and subscripts and perhaps most exciting print near letter quality characters W Near Letter Quality characters This printer s Near Letter Quality Sometimes abbreviated as NLQ character set is ideal for correspondence and other impor tant printing for it takes a keen eye to detect that it is from a dot matrix printer Normally your printer prints draft quality characters This is adequate for most work and it prints fastest 29 But for the final printout try NLQ The program below shows how 10 Demo of NLQ character set 20 LPRINT CHR 27 3 x1 30 LPRINT This line shows NEAR LETTER QUALITY 40 LPRINT CHR 27 3 x0 50 LPRINT This line shows standard print In this program line 20 selects NLQ characters with ESC x 1 command Line 30 prints a sample before line 40 switches printer back to draft printing with an ESC x 0 When you run the program you should get this This line shows NEAR LETTER QUALITY This line shows standard print Table 3 1 Near letter quality commands Control code Near letter quality ON ESC x 1 Near letter quality OFF ESC x 0 2 Italic printing Italic etters are letters that are slanted to the right Your printer can print
27. print modes work consider that each mode except pica pica is the default has a separate switch that can turned on and off via software Once the switch is on it stays on until turned off When two modes that conflict are turned on at the same time the printer must choose which one to use For example suppose you turn on both Elite and Emphasized modes Since these cannot combine the printer must make a choice in this case the printer chooses Elite Summary notes 1 Pica is the default pitch and is active when Elite is turned off 2 When two modes conflict the one of lesser priority is cancelled For example Condensed and Emphasized can not be printed at the same time printing is Emphasized 3 Elite cancels Emphasized 4 Underline and Expanded modes combine with any print modes 5 Emphasized will not mix with Elite or Condensed CHAPTER 4 FORMATTING TEXT Subjects we ll cover in Chapter 4 include e The carriage return and line feed e The amount of space between lines Moving to the next page The number of lines on a printed page e Horizontal and vertical tabs e Setting margins left right top and bottom e Centering and aligning Chapter 3 showed us all the basic techniques of using the printer Now we re ready for the more advanced ones We ll con centrate on changing the appearance of the page to suit our needs LINES AND LINE SPACING E Starting a new line Up until now the on
28. specify the actual width of the character this printer allows you to specify the position in the standard grid where the character will print You must specify the dot column in which the printed character starts and the dot column in which the character ends Why you may ask would you want to define a character this way instead of merely defin ing the overall width of the character Because this printer s pro portional character definitions can also be used to print normal width characters which are eleven dot columns wide And by centering even the narrow characters in the complete grid they will look good even when you aren t printing them proportional ly The command format for proportional character definition is exactly the same as you have learned the only difference is the attribute byte m0 As you know the first bit of m0 is used to specify whether the character is descender or not The next three bits are used to specify the starting print column accep table values are 0 to 7 The last four bits specify the ending print column acceptable values are 4 to 11 The minimum 95 character width is five dots so you could not for instance specify a starting column of 6 and an ending column of 8 even though those are both within the acceptable range If you in advertantly give an incorrect width value however your printer is forgiving it will automatically revert to the default width of eleven dot columns Just as
29. the ESC 6 command without the ESC R gives you access to the international characters The ESC 7 turns these characters back into control codes The low order control codes can also be defined but not all of them can be printed with ease The ESC T 1 command makes them printable and the ESC I 0 command returns them normal Just as the higher control codes hide the italic international characters the lower control codes hide the roman international characters Let s see how these commands work with the following pro gram 10 Demo of characters in the control code are 20 LPRINT CHR 27 II 30 FOR I 0 TO 6 40 LPRINT CHR I 50 NEXT I 60 LPRINT CHR 16 CHR 17 70 FOR 1 21 TO 31 80 LPRINT CHR I 90 NEXT I 100 LPRINT 110 FOR I 128 TO 134 120 LPRINT CHR I 74 130 NEXT I 140 LPRINT CHR 144 CHR 145 150 FOR I 149 TO 159 160 LPRINT CHRS I 170 NEXT I 180 LPRINT CHR 27 10 190 END When you run this program you should get like this a M ESRA AGUA GY BOUL ESS AGUaUEEY Table 5 6 Control code area commands Control code ESC 6 ESC 7 ESC T 1 ESC T 0 Printing BIG characters You can even enlarge your character sets for attention grabb ing headings or special effects There are six commands you can use Everything following any of them will be enlarged as shown below until the cancel code is entered j i Catan
30. the Connector Signals Connecting with Computer 221 Connecting with IBM PC and COMPAQ BASIC programming Listing programs Connecting with Apple I computers Applesoft BASIC Listing programs Connecting with TRS 80 computers TRS 80 BASIC Listing programs Connecting with Kaypro Osborne and other CP M computers Using MBASIC Listing programs Appendix D Appendix E Appendix F Appendix G Appendix H CHAPTER 1 SETTING UP YOUR PRINTER Subjects we ll cover in Chapter 1 include Choosing a suitable place for your printer e Unpacking your new printer e Setting it up WHERE SHALL WE PUT IT Before you do anything else give some thought to where you ll be using your printer Obviously it will be somewhere near your computer And both printer and computer will lead longer healthier lives if they like their surroundings For in stance we recommend e Using the printer on a flat surface e Keeping it out of direct sunlight and away from heat producing units e Using it only in temperatures where you are comfortable e Avoiding areas with a lot of dust grease or humidity e Giving it clean electricity Don t connect it to the same circuit used by large noise producing appliances such as refrigerators e The line voltage should be the same voltage that s specified on the identification plate within 10 of the recommended voltage WHAT HAVE WE HERE Now let s take a look at what s
31. way of sending codes to the printer for each one of them Instead as we introduce you to each new com mand we will show the commands as in this example ESC W 1 28 This command that turns on expanded printing ESC as we mentioned earlier is the escape code which is ASCII code 27 A letter or number in quotes such as the W above means that the character should be sent to the printer without the quotes In our example you should send a capital W following the escape code In BASIC you could do this in a couple of ways by sending the character itself e g LPRINT W or by using the CHR function to send the ASCII code for the character e g LPRINT CHR 87 Many of printer commands end with a 1 or 0 When shown as in the above example i e no quotes and no CHR you can use either ASCII code 1 i e CHR 1 or the character 1 which is ASCII code 49 The same idea applies to commands ending with 0 So for out example above any of these BASIC statements will have the same result LPRINT CHR 27 W CHR 1 LPRINT CHR 27 W CHR 49 LPRINT CHR 27 W1 Even though there are many commands that require the use of ASCII code 0 the character 0 ASCII code 48 cannot be substituted In these cases instead of an unadorned 0 we will show CHR 0 each time these commands are referenced That s it for the basics You are now ready to learn how to use the many features
32. you ll get consecutive line feeds one after the other If you push the On Line key while holding this key you can advance the paper to the top of the next page or a new form ON LINE KEY and INDICATOR Glows green when the printer can receive data from your computer on line When the printer is off line it sends a signal to the computer indicating that it cannot accept data Pressing the On Line key switches the printer on line and off line 10 Extra functions There are eleven more functions that are not directly specified on the control panel You can use six of them by press ing a key or keys when you turn on the power five others are activated by pressing two control keys at once For details please refer to the end of this chapter M Other controls There are other controls not connected to the control panel board Some of the more important ones are POWER SWITCH The switch to turn the printer on is at the back on the left side PLATEN KNOB This knob is at the middle of the right side and lets you turn the platen by hand just like a typewriter Caution Turn this knob only with the Power switch off Turn ing it with the power on could damage the platen drive gears RELEASE LEVER The release lever is on top of the printer near the left rear corner You ll be using it often it controls how strongly the paper is held against the platen The release lever has four positions the top setting
33. 0 500 510 520 530 540 550 560 570 580 590 600 610 620 630 640 650 660 Tae hay If you are using with the IBM mode DIP switch 1 6 off change the following lines to the program given above 109 20 LINE 8 CHR 27 CHR 65 CHR 8 CHR 27 CHR 50 40 LINE 12 CHR 27 CHR 65 CHR 12 CHR 27 CHR 50 PLOTTING WITH YOUR PRINTER This section of the manual gets into more serious BASIC pro gramming just because it s required in order to have the com puter act as a plotter driver Don t be intimidated while it s beyond the scope of this manual to teach BASIC if you try the examples and take it slowly you should be doing some fancy plot ting of your own before you know it If designing and calculating dot graphics images by laying them out on graph paper seems too tedious to you then let the computer do the work for you With your computer doing the calculations and your printer plotting the output you can come up with some terrific business graphs charts and mathematical function plots The best way to do this is to set up an array in memory This is your graph paper The first thing to do is to determine how big you want your output to be this will determine the size of your array If you have grandiose plans to fill an entire page with plotter output you better have lots of memory in your com puter With 60 dots per inch horizontally and 72 dots per inch vertically it takes
34. 09 214 219 224 Wome rel i om fi Bg 304 fi Figure 5 1 70 Figure 5 1 shows what this program will print If your chart doesn t lool like this because it has regular letters and numbers instead of the special symbols then your computer is only using seven bits You can get the correct printout by changing line 160 to this 160 LPRINT I CHR 27 gt CHR 1L CHR 27 3 5 CHR 9 A note for the IBM PC users When you run this program you cannot get the right pointed arrow CHR 26 with the IBM PC computers This is because the IBM PC does not send this code to the printer There is a solution to avoid this problem Change lines 100 and 120 to the either set of the following lists 100 O INP amp H379 IF 0 gt 128 THEN 100 110 OUT amp H378 26 OUT amp H37A 5 OUT amp H37A 4 120 LPRINT LPRINT 100 O INP amp H3BD IF 0 lt 128 THEN 100 110 OUT amp H3BC 26 OUT amp H3BE 5 OUT amp H3BE 5 120 LPRINT LPRINT So how are all of these strange characters used Here is a short program that demonstrate how the graphics characters can be combined to create a figure the 5 of clubs 10 LPRINT CHR 27 6 20 LPRINT CHR 218 CHR 196 CHR 196 CHR 196 CHR 196 CHR 196 CHR 191 30 LPRINT CHR 179 CHR 53 CHR 32 CHR 32 CHR 32 CHR 32 CHR 179 40 LPRINT CHR 179 CHR 32 CHR 5 CHR 32 CHR 5
35. 1 TO 3 20 LPRINT Relative 30 LPRINT CHR 27 3 t CHR I 20 CHR 0 40 LPRINT Horizontal 0 LPRINT CHR 27 5 3CHR I 10 CHR 0 0 LPRINT Tab 70 NEXT I 56 80 LPRINT 90 END Relative Horizontal Tab Relative Horizontal Tab Relative Horizontal Tab E Vertical tabs Vertical tabs have the same kinds of uses that horizontal tabs do they just work in the other direction Horizontal tabs allow you to reach a specific column on the page no matter where you start from Vertical tabs are the same If you have a vertical tab set at line 20 a vertical tab or lt VT gt will move you to line 20 whether you start from line 5 or line 19 The vertical tab is not set at the power on default If you send a CHR 11 which is the ASCII code for lt VT gt before we have set up tabs advance the paper one line Enter this program to see how this works 10 Demo of vertical tabs HO LPRINT CHR 11 FIRST TAB 50 LPRINT CHRS CEL SECOND TAB 60 LPRINT CHR 11 THIRD TAB 70 LPRINT CHR 11 FOURTH TAB Now let s set some vertical tabs of our own Add these lines to the program 20 PRINT CHR 27 B CER 10 CHR 20 30 LPRINT CHR 40 CHR 50 CHR 0O ESC B is the command to set vertical tabs Like the horizontal tab setting command tab positions must be defined in ascending order Our example sets vertical tabs at lines 10 20 40 and 50 Then the CHR 11 in each of the follow
36. 5 5 International character sets Country _ 35 36 64 91 92 93 94 96 123 124 125 126 USA Te TST ytiIN aT tet ty France 1 Stale elsi t tetulel Germany S 4 U ps England 4 1 ot Demark type 24 2 1 5 6 2 2 6 Sweden n E A A U a a Italy 6 i u a b i Span R S i R t 12 Jaan THUS TOUTE oe Norway OLEH OLAUl S 2 Ali Denmark type E lAluU lel oA Printing characters in the control code area When yuu refer the Appendix B you ll find many characters are printed in the control code area Remember that the low order control codes are the ASCII codes 0 through 31 plus 127 and the high order control codes are 128 through 159 plus 255 These codes don t normally print symbols on paper rather they cause the printer to change modes To make them print as normal symbols requires an extra command For example the 73 command to normalize the high order control codes is ESC 6 Try this program with the DIP switch 1 6 on 10 Demo of characters in the high control code area 20 LPRINT CHR 27 3 6 30 FOR 2 128 TO 159 40 LPRINT CHR I 50 NEXT I 60 LPRINT CHR 27 7 70 END When you run this program you ll get like this O ee ANDRRA ac NEREP ASUGGUES That s where the italic international characters have been stored So
37. 5 Eb E7 E E EA EB EC ED EE EF FO F1 F2 FS F4 F5 F F7 FB F9 FA FB FC FD FE FF en nan eees oD OA aa Most BASICs however are not quite that straight forward For example the IBM PC prints like the following oo 01 02 05 04 05 06 07 0B OA OB OC OD OA OE wea OF 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 18 1C iD tE IF www ee 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 29 29 20 2B 2C 2D 2E 2F UTHER 50 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 3A ZB 2C 2D TE 2F 0125456789 4 lt 9 49 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 40 4B 4C 4D 4E AF aABCDEFGHIJELMNO 50 51 52 53 54 55 54 57 58 59 SA SB SC SD SE SF FORSTUVWXYZENI0 60 61 62 6 64 65 64 67 6B 69 6A AB AC SD GE abrcdefghiiklmno 70 71 72 73 74 75 74 77 78 79 7A 7B 7C 7D 7E 7F parstuvwkxyz t BO 81 B2 83 84 85 B B7 B88 BA BB BC BD BE BF 0000 90 91 92 9 94 95 94 97 98 99 9A 9B 90 FD 9E PF ne eee eee AD Al AS AZ A4 AS A7 AB A AA AB AC AD AE AF nav ccr BO Bi Be BS B4 BS B 7 Ba B BA BB BC BD BE BF aw wen erence co C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C C7 Ca C9 CA CB CC CD CE CF _ ann DO D1 D2 DS D4 DS D D7 D8 D9 DA DB DC DD DE DF nee www etter eens EO E1 E ES E4 ES E7 E8 E EA EB EC ED EE EF nav vceueveveaunes FO Fl F2 F3 F4 FS F F7 FB FA FB FC FD FE FF aww
38. ARS 500 LPRINT CHR 27 T 510 END 5 0 E TA U S EXPORTS AUTOS TAS Avy AST Avy Rey Avy Act As Pid Avy fey Wy vd AoT As CHEMICALS LbabAbAsasesavesesesavasesavesebavas db avs GUNS ye alae 1 2 4 6 8 MILL TONES OF DOLLARS 100 MEMO CHAPTER 7 DOT GRAPHICS Subjects we ll cover in Chapter 7 include e This printer s bit image graphics capabilities e Printing a pre defined shape e Plotting a calcurated shape High resolution graphics In Chapter 6 you were introduced to a form of computer graphics you were able to actually define characters dot by dot In this chapter you ll learn to use the same principles to make your printer print whole pages of dot graphics We ll show you how to use dot graphics to create super download characters In addition you ll see how your printer can be used as a graphics plotter This can have some practical business applica tions as well as create some terrific computer art COMPARING DOT GRAPHICS WITH DOWNLOAD CHARACTERS A good understanding of dot graphics requires an understand ing of how dot matrix printers work you may want to review the first few pages in Chapter 6 The principles for dot graphics are the same as those for download characters There are some differences in the way they
39. CHR 32 CHR 179 50 LPRINT CHR 179 CHR 32 CHR 32 CHR 5 CHR 32 CHR 32 CHR 179 60 LPRINT CHR 179 CHR 32 CHR 5 CHR 32 CHR 5 CHR 32 CHR 179 70 LPRINT CHR 179 CHR 32 CHR 32 CHR 32 CHR 32 CHR 53 CHR 179 80 LPRINT CHR 192 CHR 196 CHR 196 CHR 196 CHR 196 CHR 196 CHR 217 90 LPRINT CHR 27 7 71 If you have a 7 bit interface add the following lines to the pro gram given above LS LPRINT CHR 27 3 gt 5 95 LPRINT CHR 27 In this program line 10 selects character set 2 so that all the graphics characters can be used including the club sym bol Then lines 20 80 print the 5 of clubs figure Line 90 cancels character set 2 which is the same as selecting character set 1 Here is what this program prints E International character sets Your printer is a multi lingual printer for it can speak in eleven languages Your printer changes languages by changing 12 characters that are different for the different languages These sets of characters are called international character sets The control codes to select the international character sets are given in Table 5 4 72 Table 5 4 International character set commands ESC R CHR 0 ESC R CHR amp 1 ESC R CHR 2 R Spain ESC R CHR 10 The characters that change are shown beneath their ASCII code in Table 5 5 Table
40. Demo of line spacing 20 FOR I 1 TO 25 30 IF I 13 THEN 60 LO LPRINT CHR 27 A CHR I 50 LPRINT THIS LINE SPACING IS SET TO I 60 NEXT I 70 LPRINT LINE SPACING IS SET TO 1 6 INCH NORMAL 80 LPRINT CHR 27 2 90 END This is what you will get FE INE SF A 3 Ne ruta INE SPACING THIS LINE SPACING THIS LINE SFACING ene nie 9 LO 11 THIS LINE SPACING Le THIS LINE SFAC ING 14 THIS LINE SPACING 1S THIS LINE SFAC ING THIS LINE SFACING THiS LINE SPACING THIS LINE SFACING 15 SET TO 19 THIS LINE SPACING 15 SET TO 20 THIS LINE SPACING IS SET TO 21 THIS LINE SPACING 15 SET TO 22 THIS LINE SPACING IS SET TO 22 THIS LINE SPACING I5 SET TO 24 THIS LINE SFACING IS SET TO 25 LINE SPACING 15 SET TO 1 INCH NORMAL 44 Line 40 changes the line spacing The command ESC A CHR n changes the line spacing to n 72 of an inch The loop that is started in line 20 increases the value of n the variable I in this program each time it is executed So the line spacing in creases as the program continues Line 30 just shortcuts the loop when I 13 since BASIC won t let us send CHR 13 without adding an unwanted CHR 10 to it Finally the ESC 2 in line 80 resets the line spacing to 6 lines per inch This is a shortcut that is the same as ESC A CHR 12 When you run this program with the DIP switch 1 6 off IBM mode you cannot get the printout as shown above The ESC
41. Figure 2 5 Prop up the paper guide by inserting the guide stand in the notches provided for it Figure 2 6 You can insert a sheet of paper by using the release lever 14 9 Now set the release lever to the auto feed setting the top position The printer will advance the paper automatically 10 When the paper stops set the release lever for single sheets again To align paper that is not in straight e Set the release lever to the adjustment setting e Straighten the paper and adjust it for the margins you want e Move the release lever back to its original setting Wl Loading sprocket feed paper This is the familiar computer paper with the holes along the sides and perforations between the sheets It is also called sprocket punched fan fold or just plain computer paper It can be as narrow as 4 and up to 10 wide Figure 2 7 shows the tractor unit Please identify the parts of the tractor 1 Turn on the printer and set the release lever for sprocket feed paper 2 If the paper guide is installed remove it 3 Place a stack of fan fold paper behind the printer 4 Open the sprocket covers on the right and left sprocket units as shown in Figure 2 7 Clamp lever Figure 2 7 Open the sprocket covers to expose the sprocket teeth 15 5 Flip the clamp levers backward This allows the two sprocket units to move freely right and left s
42. N 10 USER S MANUAL NOT INTENDED FOR SALE Federal Communications Commission Radio Frequency Interference Statement This equipment generates and uses radio frequency energy and if not installed and used properly that is in strict accordance with the manufacturer s instructions may cause in terference to radio and television reception It has been type tested and found to comply with the limits for a Class B computing device in accordance with the specifications in Subpart J of Part 15 of FCC Rules which are designed to provide reasonable protection against such interference in a residential installation However there is no guarantee that interference will not occur in a particular installation H this equipment does cause interference to radio or television reception which can be determined by turning the equipment off and on the user is encouraged to try to correct the interference by one or more of the following measures Reorient the receiving antenna Relocate the computer with respect to the receiver Move the computer away from the receiver Plug the computer into a different outlet so that computer and receiver are on dif ferent branch circuits If necessary the user should consult the dealer or an experienced radio television techni cian for additional suggestions The user may find the following booklet prepared by the Federal Communications Commission helpful How to Identify and Resolve Radio TV Interferen
43. R ON LINE NLQ 80 E K Right margin set Hold down Left margin set Press Figure 2 13 You can set many functions by the combinations of the control panel keys while in the Off Line mode Setting print start position When you want to align the print start position you can set it by the micro feed operation with the control panel instead of turning the platen knob manually 1 Set the Off Line mode by pressing the On Line key 2 While holding down the On Line key press one of the following keys Paper Feed key Forward micro feed Mode key Reverse micro feed 3 When you can set the print start position release the Paper Feed key or the Mode key first then release the On Line key E Setting the left and right margins As you ll learn in Chapter 4 you can set the left and right margins with control codes In addition you can set them by the following procedures 1 Set the Off Line mode by pressing the On Line key 2 While holding the Bold key press one of the following keys 21 Mode key Left margin set Paper Feed key Right margin set 3 While holding the two keys the print head moves across the page step by step 4 When the print head goes to the position where you want to set margin release the two keys So the printer acknowledges the margin with the sound of beep MEMO 22 CHAPTER 3 BASIC PRINTING Subjects we ll cover in Chapter 3 inclu
44. T TYPE A CHARACTER A 30 IF A THEN 50 LPRINT A GOTO 20 0 50 LPRINT LPRINT CHR 27 Now type several characters and after each press the RETURN key True to form the printer just stuffs the characters into its buffer while it waits for a carriage return code In this program the RETURN key doesn t send a car riage return code To end this program and print the contents of the buffer press RETURN alone Now add this line 10 LPRINT CHR 27 il And RUN the program Your printer responds to your typing immediately When you are finished press RETURN alone Adjusting the width of space between characters This printer provides a command that adjusts the space be tween the NLQ characters that it prints when the DIP switch 1 6 is set on The ESC CHR 32 CHR m command adds blank space between the characters The units of space that are added vary in 1 60 inch units Try this program to see how this works 10 Demo of adjusting spaces 20 LPRINT CHR 27 x1 30 FOR 1 210 TO 1 STEP 2 LO LPRINT CHR 27 CHR I 50 LPRINT This line is added I spaces 60 NEXT I 70 LPRINT This line is Normal space 80 END 66 This line is added 10 spaces This line is added 8 spaces This line is added 6 spaces This line is added 4 spaces This line is added 2 spaces This line is Normal space This command can be used to produce micro justification which is a method of j
45. T This line is EXPANDED CONDENSED ELITE 160 LPRINT CHR 27 3 P 170 LPRINT This line is EXPANDED CONDENSED PICA 180 LPRINT CHR 18 190 LPRINT CER 27 3 M S 200 LPRINT This is EXPANDED ELITE 210 LPRINT CHR 27 P 220 LPRINT This is EXPANDED PICA 230 LPRINT CER 27 WO 240 END Here s what you should get from this program 36 This line is CONDENSED ELITE pitch This line is CONDENSED PICA pitch This line is NORMAL ELITE pitch This lane is NORMAL FICA pitch This line is EXPANDED CONDENSED ELITE This line is EXPANDED CONDENSED PICA This is EXFANDED ELITE TET ee oe 8 E a CE E OF FECA Proportional printing Have you ever noticed in books and magazines Doesn t it look nice The main reason is that each character is given an amount of space proportional to its actual width A typewriter and most printer on the other hand give every character the same amount of space no matter how wide it is Pica pitch for example gives a w and an i 1 10 of an inch each Look these letters closely and you ll see that a w is two or three times as wide as an i Well you too enjoy professional looking proportional print ing You can turn proportional printing on and off with the following command Table 3 8 Proportional commands Control code Proportional ON ESC2 p 1 Proportional OFF ESC2 p 0 Try this program to see how the propo
46. THIS IS 8 J LJ Ish 2 2 SIZED PRINTING UAD te loa iM Amami SIZED FRINT ING E The optional sheet feeder The automatic sheet feeder is a handy option that feeds single cut sheets automatically Work done on cut sheets looks better that done on computer paper and you don t have to tear the ears off each sheet as you must with fan fold paper The automatic sheet feeder feeds a new sheet automatically every time the printer receives or generates a form feed Any time you wish you can turn the auto feed unit on and off by using control codes THIS IS Table 5 8 Automatic sheet feeder commands Control code ESC CHR 25 CHR 4 or 4 ESC CHR 25 CHR 0 or O Y ESC CHR 25 CHR 1 or DY ESC CHR 25 R or RY Function Select automatic feed mode Cancel automatic feed mode Insert paper Eject paper ns N Ag a When the automatic sheet feeder is installed you must set the DIP switch 1 5 on to detect the paper out condition In addition following functions are ignored when the auto matic sheet feeder is installed Setting of the page length Top and bottom margins Vertical tab settings E The macro control code The last of our group of miscellaneous codes is definitely not the least It is a user defined control code called a macro control code The term macro is from the jargonese macro instruction 77 which refers to an instructio
47. UNS CHR 9 290 FOR I 4 TO 1 4 STEP 4 300 LPRINT CHR 62 310 NEXT I 320 LPRINT 330 LPRINT CHR 9 340 SCALE 350 FOR I 2 TO 8 STEP 2 360 LPRINT SCALE 370 NEXT I 380 LPRINT 390 LPRINT CHR 9 400 FOR I 2 TO 8 STEP 2 410 LPRINT 1 1 420 NEXT I 430 LPRINT CHR 27 0 CHR 0 44Q LPRINT CHR 27 S0O 450 LPRINT CHR 9 MILLIONS OF DOLLARS 460 LPRINT CHR 27 T 470 END 94 U S EXPORTS AUTOS Peat ind id Pex Sen Bind Wd nt nt Bn Pin Bal ns nl nl Bn en ny CHEMICALS BUNS yeu seere sefe nea safer seven sees 5 foe areae serme sofro a 4 amp 3 MEL TONS OF DML Ar EB Note that we didn t have to re enter the download characters since they were already sent to the printer with the first pro gram They will stay with the printer until you download new characters to replace them or turn the printer off Even the ESC command which initializes the printer does not destroy the contents of download RAM DEFINING PROPORTIONAL CHARACTERS Except for the actual width defining characters for propor tinal printing is exactly the same as defining normal width download characters Characters can range from 5 to 11 dots wide This means that characters can be as narrow as one half the normal width Besides being able to
48. abelled it as channel 0 Try this program how to see the vertical tab channels work 59 Demo of vertical tab channels LPRINT CHR 27 b CHR 1 CHR 10 sCHRS C20 CHR 0 LPRINT CHR 27 b CHR 2 CHRS 15 CHR 25 CHR 0 LPRINT CHR 27 b CHR 3 CHRS 17 CHR 28 CHR 0 Use vertical tab channels FOR 1 1 TO 3 LPRINE TOP OF FORM LPRINT CHR 27 CHR I LPRINT CHR 11 LPRINT 1ST TAB OF CHANNELS a LPRINT CHR 11 LPRINT 2ND TAB OF CHANNEL 3I LPRINT CHR 12 NEXT I LPRINT CHR 27 e END 10 20 150 160 When you run this program you should get like this OF FORM TOF OF FORM TOF OF FORM TARE OF CHANNEL 1 iST TAB OF CHANNEL 2 1ST TAB DF CHANNEL 3 TAB OF CHANNEL 1 2ND TAB OF CHANNEL 2 2ND TAB OF CHANNEL 3 TOF IST SND 60 In this program we set tabs at 10 and 20 in channel 1 in line 20 In line 30 we set tabs 15 and 25 in channel 2 and in line 40 we set tabs 17 and 28 in channel 3 Because the channels are stored you must make the printer to recall one before you use it so we used ESC CHR n0 in line 80 CENTERING AND ALIGNING TEXT Text can be arranged in any of three formats left aligned nor mal printing with ragged right margin centered between the margins or right aligned These are selected by the following commands Table 4 11 Aligning commands Left aligned printing ESC a CHR 0 a
49. aphics informa tion and put it into BASIC DATA statements The program itself is short and simple The loop starting at line 100 reads the data statements into a string array variable called LOGO In line 170 we change the line spacing to 8 72 inch so that the lines of graphics data will connect vertically The actual printing is done in the loop between lines 180 and 210 line 190 sends the graphics control code to the printer and line 200 sends one line of graphics data The printout from the program is shown right below the pro gram 10 Prints S amp S logo 20 LINE 8 CHR 27 A CHRS 8 30 Set line spacing to 1 6 LINE 12 CHR 27 2 50 Select dot graphics 60 GRAPHIC CHR 27 CHR 42 CHR 0 70 DIM LOGO 4 80 WIDTH LPT1 255 90 Read data 100 FOR ROW 1 TO 4 110 FOR COLUMN 1 TO 100 120 READ P 130 LOGO ROW LOGO ROW CHR P 140 NEXT COLUMN 150 NEXT ROW 160 Print logo 170 LPRINT LINE 3 180 FOR ROW 1 TO 4 190 LPRINT GRAPHIC CHR 100 CHR 0 200 LPRINT LOGO ROW 210 NEXT ROW 220 LPRINT LINE 12 230 Row 1 240 DATA Oy Oy 20 ot By Pa We To 250 DATA 14 14 14 14 14 7 7 3 3 COO DATE Woo 15 O JO Og 105 305 O O PTO DATA Gy tes O Be Tedas entik 200 DATE 343 I6 Ts Ta Ts 3s Og Wy 0 290 DATA Ox 70 Og Oy Og Og Oy Oe 0 300 DATA Og VO Oy Og OS Oe HON Os Os 310 DATA O Oras O O lS o TS Ta Ta 320 DATA Day 145 U
50. aphics modes you can use they re summarized in Table 7 2 114 Table 7 2 Dot graphics commands Function Normal density 60 dots inch Double density 120 dots inch Double density double speed ESC CHR amp 2 n1 n2 m1 m2 Quadruple density 240 dots inch ESC CHRS 3 n1 n2 m1 m2 CRT graphics 80 dots inch ESC CHR 4 21 n2 m1 m2 Plotter graphics 72 dots inch ESC CHR 5 n1 n2 m1 m2 CRT graphics type I 90 dots inch ESC CHR 6 n1 n2 m1 m2 The command syntax for all of the commands is the same just as you have learned it for the ESC CHR 0 normal density command The number of columns to be printed is 71 256 n2 So what do these different modes do On the following pages are actual size reproductions of printouts of the same image printed in each of the seven different graphics modes They were all printed using the plotting program in this chapter with a rather complex set of formulas starting at line 600 Normal density graphics 115 Double density graphics Double density double speed CRT graphics Quadruple density graphics 116 117 CRT graphics type H 118 So if quadruple density looks so great why not use it all the time Let s try an experiment on your printer which will show just how the different modes work Using the first program in this chapter change line 50 to try each of th
51. are implemented however While download commands can be used to define a character between four and eleven columns of dots wide dot graphics commands can be used to define a shape as narrow as one column of dots wide or as wide as 1920 dots There is no descender data with dot graphics graphics im ages are always printed with the top seven or eight pins of the print head depending on whether you have a 7 bit or 8 bit inter face 102 So when do you use graphics and when do you use download characters Practically anything you can do with graphics you can do with download characters and vice versa A clever pro grammer could actually plot a mathematical curve using download characters or use strings of graphics data as user defined characters But why do it the hard way There are several instances when dot graphics is clearly the best way to ap proach the problem elf the graphics image to be printed is wider than 11 dots or higher than 8 dots elf an image is to be printed just one time as opposed to a frequently used text character elf you want higher resolution this printer can print as many as 240 dots per inch in dot graphics mode text mode which includes download characters prints 60 dots per inch USING THE DOT GRAPHICS COMMANDS The command to print normal density 60 dots per inch horizontal 72 dots per inch vertical dot graphics uses this for mat ESC CHR 0 n1 n2 m1 m2 Jus
52. argin only takes effect after a form feed Line 50 sets the top margin line 30 sets the bottom margin and line 100 clears both margins when we are done 0 0 IS LINE 105 IS LINE 196 IS LINE 107 IS LINE 8 IS LIME 109 IS LINE 110 15 LINE 111 IS LINE 112 IS LINE 113 IS LINE 114 15 LINE 115 IS LINE 116 IS LINE 117 15 LINE 118 IS LINE 119 5 6 46 0 60 0 0 52 SETTING LEFT AND RIGHT MARGINS The left and right margins of this printer work just like a typewriter once they are set all the printing is done between them The commands to set the margins are given in the follow ing table Table 4 6 Left and right margin commands Set left margin at column n ESC CHR n Set right margin at column x ESC Q CHR x Set lett margin at column n1 CESC X CHRS n1 CHRS n2 and right margin at column 2 Try setting the margins with this program 10 Demo of margins 20 GOSUB 70 30 LPRINT CHR 27 3 1 CHR 10 40 LPRINT CHRS 27 3 O 1 CHRS 707 50 GOSUB 70 60 END 70 FOR I 1 TO 80 80 LRRINT x 90 NEXT I 100 LPRINT 110 RETURN The first thing that this program does is to branch to the subroutine that starts in line 70 This subroutine prints 80 X s in a row The first time that the subroutine is used all the X s fit in one line Then line 30 sets the left margin to 10 and line 40 sets the right margin to 70 Once again the subroutin
53. as you get 8 dots in the other graphics modes MEMO 122
54. at least 540 bytes of memory for each square inch of plotted area That doesn t sound so bad but an area 8 inches square requires over 32K Your array should be two dimensional just like graph paper where one dimension will be the number of columns of dots and the other dimension is the number of printing lines remember that you can have up to eight rows of dots per printed line Here s a program that will use calculated shape graphics to plot a circle As you ll see by changing a few lines it can be used to plot virtually any shape 10 Plotting program 20 Set program constants 30 MAXCOL Z 75 MAXROWZ 14 4O DIM BIT MAXCOL MAXROWZ 50 MASK 1 64 MASKZ 4 l 60 MASKZ 2 32 MASK 5 70 MASK 3 16 MASK 6 2 A ie th 110 80 LX 20 LY 20 90 LXFAC 72 LX LYFAC 87 LY 100 Plot curve 110 GOSUB 600 120 130 Send bit image map to printer 140 LPRINT CHR 27 A CHR 6 150 FOR ROW 0 TO MAXROWZ 160 A 11 170 LPRINT CHR 27 3 CHR 0 CHR MAXCOLZ CHR 0 5 180 FOR COL 1 TO MAXCOL 190 A A CHR BITZ COL ROWZ 200 NEXT COL 210 LPRINT Ag 220 NEXT ROW 230 LPRINT CHR 27 A CHR 12 240 END 250 260 Subroutine to draw a line from X1 Y1 to X2 Y2 270 280 XL X2 X1 gt YL Y2 Y1 290 NX ABS XL LXFAC NY ABS YL LYFAC 300 IF NX lt NY THEN NX NY 310 NSZ INT NX 1 320 DX XL NSZ DY YL NS 330 FOR I 1 TO 7 340 X1 X1 DX YL Y1 DY
55. ce Problems This booklet is available from the U S Government Printing Office Washington D C 20402 Stock No 004 000 00345 4 For compliance with Federal Noise Interference Standard this equipment requires a shielded cable This statement will be applied only for the printers marketed in USA Self Declaration Radio interferences regarding this equipment has been eliminated according to Vig 1046 1984 announced by the DBP DBP has been informed about the introduction of this special equipment and has been conceded the right to examine the whole series It is upon the responsibility of the user to assume that his own assembled system is in ac cordance with the technical regulations under Vfg 1046 1984 To observe FTZ regulations it is necessary to establish all connections to the printer with shielded cable The equipment may only be opened by qualified service representatives This statement will be applied only for the printers marketed in West Germany Trademark Acknowledgement NX 10 grafstar Star Micronics Co Ltd Apple Apple I Apple II Apple He Applesoft Apple computer Inc Commodore C 64 Commodore Business Machines Inc Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation CP M Digital Research IBM Personal Computer IBM PC International Business Machines Corp Kaypro Kaypro Corporation Microsoft BASIC Microsoft Corporation Osborne 1 Osborne Computer Corporation TRS 80 Radio Shack a division of Tandy Corporat
56. computer is a useless collection of chips and wire why should we think of it as something special Anyway computers are here to stay let s accept them with good grace First steps The first things that a beginner learns to do are to list a pro gram and to print a character string Certainly these are the easiest operations one can do but even they may depend on what computer you have In Microsoft BASIC we can list all the steps in a program by entering LIST This lists them on the CRT screen if we want to print them on a printer we prefix the command with an L enter LLIST The Microsoft BASIC command for outputting information is PRINT Like the LIST command this displays the information on the CRT screen so we have to add an L 32 LPRINT if we want to use the printer Just put whatever you want to print between quotes and after LPRINT anything enclosed in quotes is called a character string For example we would use LPRINT Hello to output Hello to the printer We ll see later how to LPRINT things other than character strings We started with Microsoft BASIC because it is the most wide ly used version of BASIC around The programs in this manual are written in Microsoft BASIC so they should run on most com puters But if strange things happen when you try to run a pro gram check the BASIC manual that came with your computer Let s talk about Apple II computers for a minute These enormously popula
57. de e Listing BASIC programs on the printer e How a program prints things Control codes escape codes and command syn tax e Near letter quality NLQ characters e Fixed and proportional character spacing e Special printing Printing in italics Underlining Superscripts and subscripts Boldface and emphasized text Mixing print modes To show you how to control your printer from a program we choose BASIC because it is easy to learn and easy to use Also more personal computer users program in BASIC than in any other language The rest of this manual will show you a little BASIC just enough for you to use your printer We re not going to try to make you an expert programmer though only get you started There are many excellent books that will teach you BASIC so if you discover that you like to program you should have no trouble learning more about it SOME BASICS OF BASIC E A new language Many people who meet BASIC for the first time are in timidated Some are put off by the idea of learning any new 24 language perhaps recalling the rigors of high school Latin Others are unnerved by anything having to do with computers Well don t be In the first place BASIC may well be the easiest language you could learn it has a vary limited vocabulary a simple but precise grammar and its dialects unlike those of English usually different from each other only in minor detail Without programming a
58. e different modes Just change the 0 to 1 2 3 etc in turn Your printouts should look something like this ESC CHR 1 ESC CHR 2 m FORTESA ESC CHRS 3 ESC CHR 6 As you can see the different modes seem to condense the printed image So to get the same image in a higher density mode you must plot more points This requires twice as much memory for your array twice as much computing time and twice as much printing time but the results may be wirth it Our engineers have given programmers a unique shortcut for program development double density double speed graphics Although this mode requires just as much memory and com 119 puting time as double density it prints at the same speed as nor mal density graphics Amazing you say Well it is until you know the secret Every other column of dots is ignored so the output is actually the same as normal density graphics The ad vantage is that you can write and debug your programs at dou ble speed then change to double density graphics for terrific out put This printer has three other densities CRT plotter and CRT type II which can be used to achieve greater compatibility with various hardware and software configurations Plotter density can be especially for simplifying programming since it has equal densities both the horizontal and vertical directions
59. e is used but this time the X s won t all fit on one line since there is now only room for 60 characters between the margins Run the program The results will look like this XXXXXAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXAAXXXXAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXKXXXXXXXXKXAXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXAXXXXXXXXXXXXAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 53 When you want to reset the margins to the default values you have two choices You can either turn the printer off and back on or you can set margin values equal to the default values This means that you should set a left margin of 0 and right margin of 80 in pica pitch If you change the pitch of your printing after you set your margins the margins will not change They stay at the same place on the page So if you set the margins to give you 65 col umns of printing when you are using pica type then you change to elite type you will have room for more than 65 columns of elite printing between the margins HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL TABS Suppose you need to move across the page to a certain posi tion several times in a document It s not much fun to type in space after space And you don t have to you can tab your way across the page Your printer s tabs are like those on a typewriter but much more powerful You have both horizontal and vertical tabs which can be used for both text and graphics and they re real ly handy for indenting paragraphs and making tables
60. e one stored in the printer s RAM this chapter will tell you how to create a macro In addition if you set the Panel mode Italic mode or Italic and Panel mode by the control panel settings at the power on these functions will be remain with this control code Putting your printer to sleep You know how to put your printer off line with the On Line key on the control panel Your printer has another off line state that can be controlled from your computer When you turn the printer off line from your computer this printer will ignore anything that you send it except for the code to go on line again CHR 19 is the code to turn your printer off line CHR 17 turns your printer to on line status Printing the bottom of the sheet Sometimes when you are using individual sheets of paper you may want to print near the bottom of a sheet The paper out detector usually stops the printer when you are about 1 inch from the bottom of the sheet This is notify you if you are runn ing out of continuous paper Your printer has the ability to print right to the bottom of the sheet You can disable the paper out detector so that it doesn t 63 stop the printer This will allow you to print to the end of the sheet and even beyond if you are not careful The codes to con trol the paper out detector along with the other codes that we have just learned are in the following table Table 5 1 Some miscellaneous commands
61. ed to print a logo special characters for foreign languages scientific and professional ap plications or any other specific printing task DOT MATRIX PRINTING In order to create download characters you ll need some understanding of how dot matrix printers work They re called dot matrix because each character is made up of a group of dots Look closely at some printed characters produced by your printer and you will see the dots Figure 6 1 shows how the let ter C is formed by printing 15 dots The printhead in this printer consists of nine wires stacked one atop the other Figure 6 2 shows an enlarged schematic view of the front of the printhead showing the ends of the wires and their relationship to the printed draft characters As you can 82 see the capital letters use the top seven wires of the printhead and the descenders such as the lower case p shown use the bottom seven pins As the printhead moves across the page in either direction that s what is meant by bi directional print ing it prints one column of dots at a time Each time a dot is sup posed to print an electromagnet inside the printhead causes the appropriate wire to strike the ribbon making this printer an m pact printer Figure 6 1 The letter C is created by printing 15 dots O 0000 0 0 0000 0000 0 O 2020 0 0 0666 6000 6066060 2 0 Figure
62. en between printing text subscripts are turned on in line 70 with ESC S 1 and finally off in line 90 Again everything prints on one line because of the semicolons CHANGING THE PRINT PITCH In printer talk the number of characters that can be printed in one inch is called the print pitch or character pitch Normally your printer is set for 10 characters per inch which is called pica and is the same as the pica pitch on some typewriters This works out to 80 characters per line You can also print 12 characters per inch elite pitch This gives you 96 characters per line You can set these pitches by using the Mode key on the con trol panel manually or by software as shown in the table below Table 3 5 Print pitch commands Characters inch ESC P ESC M Try this program to see how these two pitches work Be sure to set the printer to draft mode 10 Demo of pica and elite pitches 20 LPRINT CHR 27 3 M 30 LPRINT This line is ELITE pitch LO LPRINT CHR 27 P 50 LPRINT This line is PICA pitch normal When you run this program you should get this This line is ELITE pitch This line is FICA pitch normal 33 Line 20 turns on elite pitch with ESC M Line 30 prints a line at 12 characters per inch The ESC P in line 40 resets the printer to pica pitch and line 50 prints a line in pica pitch Expanded print Each of the print pitches can be enlar
63. er set you normally use with IBM mode is called character set 1 The special characters are printed out when you send ASCII codes 160 255 to the printer Your printer also offers character set 2 which is almost the same as character set 1 except for the addition of ASCII codes 3 6 21 and 128 159 Character set 2 is selected with ESC 6 to go back to character set 1 use ESC 7 You can also specify the power on default character set by set ting DIP switch 1 7 on for character set 1 and off for character set 2 The following program will print out all of the graphics characters available 10 LPRINT CHR 27 3 0 20 LPRINT CHR 27 3 6 30 FOR J 3 TO 6 LO LPRINT J CHR J CHR 9 50 NEXT J 60 LPRINT 20 CHR 20 70 LPRINT 80 LPRINT 21 CHR 21 CHR 9 90 LPRINT 26 100 LPRINT CHR 26 120 LPRINT 130 FOR J 128 TO 254 STEP 5 140 FOR I J TO J 4 150 IF I gt 254 THEN 170 160 LPRINT I CHR I CHR 9 170 NEXT I 180 LPRINT LPRINT 190 NEXT J 69 20 4 dia EA mee wi myn ey 7 242 A7 amp 252 N gt amp 7 ace yey tee 0 LBO 185 1 OO tee Ree Se Ley yy em Neen teed a rame ane EEN ZAG Character set 2 4 2G 7 129 134 139 144 149 154 Loo lo 14 174 179 184 189 194 199 204 2
64. et To demonstrate how to use the NLQ download characters let s use this character set to print a small graph Try this pro gram 10 LPRINT CHR 27 x1l 20 LPRINT CHR 27 CHR 0 CHR 0 CHR 0 30 LPRINT CHR 27 amp CHR 0 CHR 60 CHR 62 40 FOR N 60 TO 62 50 FOR M 0 TO 22 60 READ MM 70 LPRINT CHR MM 80 NEXT M 90 NEXT N 100 LPRINT ILO DATA LI 2 Ga Sees O 0 241 By 5 2 00 120 a 6 8 16 224 0 0 224 16 8 gt 0 130 DATA 139 124 0 66 4 64 36 16 2 16 12 0 140 DATA 120 4 0 4 0 96 4 0 4 8 0 150 DATA 139 46 16 2 60 0 48 0 48 0 48 0 160 Te 92 32 4 60 0 48 0 48 0 18 0 170 LPRINT CHR 27 D CHR 11 CHR 0 180 LPRINT CHR 27 3 h CHR 1 190 LPRINT U S EXPORTS 200 LPRINT CHR 27 h CHR 0 210 LPRINT CHR 27 3 1 CHR 220 LPRINT AUTOS CHR 9 230 FOR I 4 TO 9 3 STEP 4 1 0 99 240 LPRINT CHR 61 250 NEXT I 260 LPRINT 270 LPRINT CHEMICALS CHR 9 280 FOR I 4 TO 8 7 STEP 290 LPRINT CHR 60 300 NEXT I 310 LPRINT 320 LPRINT GUNS CHR 9 330 FOR I 4 TO 1 4 STEP 4 340 LPRINT CHR 62 3 350 NEXT I 360 LPRINT 370 LPRINT CHR 9 380 SCALE 390 FOR I 2 TO 8 STEP 2 400 LPRINT SCALE 410 NEXT I 420 LPRINT 430 LPRINT CHR 9 3 440 FOR I 2 TO 8 STEP 2 450 LPRINT Pols 460 NEXT I 470 LPRINT CHR 27 3 0 CHR 0 480 LPRINT CHR 27 3 S0 490 LPRINT CHR 9 MILLIONS OF DOLL
65. etters in the word NOT so that it doesn t even print In line 80 CHR 24 deletes the words in line 70 The semicolon at the end of line 70 prevents a line feed from causing that line to print before the printer receives the CHR 24 code The text in line 90 prints as it normally would because it is after CHR 24 Printing zeroes Believe it or not there are two types of zeroes There is of course the type we use every day 0 and this is what your printer will print if you don t do anything The other type is used almost exclusively in computers and engineering It is called the slash zero and is written like this The line through the number is supposed to prevent you from misreading it as the letter O Back before high quality printers were available this was a good idea but you really have no need for it although you may want to use the slash zero for special effect E Immediate print This printer can print at fine rate of 120 characters per se cond But it will also print more slowly at the speed of your typ ing In immediate print mode the printhead prints one character at a time as you send it This printer also moves the paper up so that you can see the current line and then down to continue printing 65 You can turn immediate print mode on with ESC i 1 But before looking at it let s review the normal operation of the print buffer Enter this program 20 Ag _ INPU
66. ew little wrinkle in this program though The semicolons at the end of the first three lines told BASIC that those lines were to be continued Therefore BASIC didn t send a carriage return and line feed at the end of those lines We just did this to il lustrate that all these control codes can be used in the middle of a line It s easy to underline or 211211126 only part of a line W Superscripts and subscripts Your printer can print in two different heights of characters The smaller characters are called superscripts and subscripts and are half the height of normal characters Superscripts print even with the tops of regular printing while subscripts print even with the bottom of regular printing They are frequently used to reference footnotes and in mathematical formulas Table 3 4 has the codes for using superscripts and subscripts Table 3 4 Superscripts and subscripts commands Control code ESC S 0 ESC S 1 ESC T Try this program to see them work a R x 10 Demo of superscripts and subscripts 20 LPRINT Look 30 LPRINT CHR 27 S0 40 LPRINT SUPERSCRIPTS SO LPRINT CHRSCATI TT 60 LPRINT amp 70 LPRINT CHR 27 3 S91 80 LPRINT SUBSCRIPTS 90 LPRINT CHR 27 T 100 LPRINT on one line Look SUPERSCRIPTS amp gouneserererse On one line 32 Here line 30 turns on superscripts with ESC S 0 It s turn ed off in line 50 with ESC T Th
67. g dots the printhead would have to slow down and back up to print both dots not very efficient To avoid this inefficiency this printer will not allow you to define a character like Figure 6 6 Actually you can define it but when it prints your printer will leave out the overlapping dots so that it would print like Figure 6 5 86 m mM mM Mm mM mM mM mM mM Mam 128 ASCH Code WRONG 64 Descender Start column End column M Descender 128 Start 16 End Total 8 Figure 6 6 Dots cannot overlap those in immediately adjacent half columns will be ignored when the character is printed E Add up each column of dots Now it s time to give our creative side a break and get down to some basic arithmetic That s where the numbers down the left side of the grid come in Notice that there is a number for each row of dots and that each number is twice the number below it By making these numbers powers of two we can take any com bination of dots in a vertical column and assign them a unique value Some examples will make this clearer As shown in Figure 6 7 if we add the numbers for the dots that print in a col umn the sum will be a number in the range of 0 to 255 Each number from 0 255 represents a uniqu combination of dots r ee 7 128 128 64 64 64 3 32 32 32 e 32 16 16 16 8 8 8 4
68. g when the cover is off Ribbon guide Print head Ribbon Figure 1 5 All you have to do is to slide the print head carriage manually to your right or left then the ribbon slips down by itself into its proper position CHAPTER 2 GETTING TO KNOW YOUR PRINTER Subjects we ll cover in Chapter 2 include e Parts of the printer what they re for and how to use them e Paper selection and loading e Adjustment e Connecting your printer to the computer e Extra functions with the control panel CONTROLS AND PARTS OF THE PRINTER Parts of the printer First we ll go over the parts of the printer You saw most of these when you unpacked your printer Now we ll give you a brief explanation of what they do For details on the initial set up of this printer with all components in place see Chapter 1 PRINTER COVER This protects the ribbon and the print head from dust and dirt and cuts down the sound of the printer PAPER GUIDE As you ve guessed this flat plastic molding guides the paper during printing it is raised for single sheets and lies flat for sprocket feed paper POWER CORD This cord connects the printer to its power source usually a wall outlet It s located at the left rear of the printer PRINT HEAD This is the unit that does the actual printing Like the strike lever in a typewriter tiny stiff wires in the print head hit the paper through a
69. ged to twice its normal width This is called expanded print Try this program to see of expanded print Demonstration of CHR 14 3 EXPANDED CHR 20 3 printing Notice that CHR 14 EXPANDED mode Demo LPRINT LPRINT LPRINT LPRINT LPRINT LPRINT LPRINT LPRINT how it works 10 20 30 40 90 100 LPRINT automatically turns off at the end of a line of FF NDE printing Sa EPCS ccc ees Demonstration Notice that automatically turns off at the end of a line Expanded print set with CHR 14 is automatically cancelled at the end of the line This is convenient in many applications such as for one line titles Note that you didn t need to put an ESC in front of the CHR 14 although ESC CHR 14 works just the same You can also cancel one line expanded print before a carriage return with CHR 20 as done in line 50 Sometimes you may wish to stay in expanded print for more than one line Change your program to this of permanent expanded mode CHR 27 WI Permanent expanded mode stays on until Nig is mt CHR 27 WO turned off Demo LPRINT LPRINT LPRINT LPRINT LPRINT LPRINT 34 Now the results look like this FA TF a tke eet OE EM OY mitra esse ES EL EM tye UTR AMT A A woes burned Off When you turn on expanded print with ESC W 1 it stays on until you turn i
70. he nine wires in the printhead So our grid is eight dots high It s also possible to use the bottom eight pins just as the g P p q and y of the standard character sets do These are called descenders because the bottom of the character descends below the baseline of the rest of the characters 85 One bit in the download character definition command is to be treated as a descender or not We ll get to the command in due time For now if your character uses the top eight dots write in a one next to the word Descender on the layout grid if it uses the bottom eight dots write in a zero In our example we ll want to the bottom of the flask to line up with the baseline of the other characters so it will not be a descender As shown in Figure 6 5 we ve written in a Il on out grid mMm m M M M Mm M Mg M Ma M ASCII Code Descender T Start column End column M Descender 128 Start 16 End Figure 6 5 We ve designed a character and decided that it would not be a descender hence the I written in E Rule 2 Dots cannot overlap As you can see in Figure 6 5 our flask has a nearly continuous outline But you may ask why not make it a really solid line and print all the intermediate dots as shown in Figure 6 6 Because the dots that straddle the vertical lines in the grid actually overlap those inside the boxes If we tried to print overlappin
71. how these characters are designed by using a grid to layout the dots Now you can define characters exactly the same way Make up some grids photocopy Figure 6 4 if you wish and get ready to be creative Just in case you are not feel ing creative and to make our explanations a little clearer we ll be using a picture of a chemist s flask as an example of a draft 84 download character You can see how we ve laid it out in Figure 6 5 Later in this chapter we ll use this character to create a small graph m Mm Mm M M M M Mm My M 128 ASCII Code 64 Descender 32 Start column End column 16 8 M Descender 128 Start 16 End 4 2 l 1 Totai Yi ae ee ee 9 Figure 6 4 Use this grid or one similar to it to define your own draft characters You ll notice that Figure 6 4 includes a lot of information around the grid Don t be intimidated we ll explain each item as we come to it in our discussion of defining and actually printing download characters You may have noticed another difference between this grid and the one show in Figure 6 3 it s only eight boxes high Which leads us to E Rule 1 Draft download characters are eight dots high As you noticed in Figure 6 2 capital letters most lowercase letters and most special characters use only the top seven pins of the printhead Draft download characters can go one better they can use as many as eight of t
72. ical marvels had a bell in them that could be heard for blocks This bell was used to signal the operator that somethings needed attention The code that the computer sent to the teletype machine to ring the bell was reasonably enough called a bell code Well the name bell code is still with us even if the bell has changed to a beeper and a lot of people still call the beeper a bell even if it doesn t sound like one So with our trivia lesson out of the way let s see how we can ring the bell The code to sound the bell is CHR 7 which is ASCII code 7 or BEL Any time your printer receives this code it will 62 sound the bell for a quarter of a second This can be used to re mind an operator to change the paper or to make another adjust ment to the printer You can try this by typing LPRINT CHR 7 E Resetting the printer Up to now when we wanted to reset the printer to the power on condition we have had to either turn the printer off and then on again or to send the specific codes that reset the particular features There is an easier way The control code ESC will reset all of the printer s features to the power on condition as determined by the DIP switches with two exceptions Those exceptions are that ESC will not erase any characters that you have stored in the printer s RAM memory Chapter 5 tells you how to create your own characters and it won t erase the macro if you hav
73. in the carton Open it up and check each item in the box against Figure 1 1 There should be four items Figure 1 1 Check to make sure you have all four items 1 printer 2 paper guide 3 ribbon cartridge and 4 user s manual Let s move on the next step E Removing the printer cover The cover is important for two reasons it keeps dust and dirt away from the printer s delicate innards and it quiets the printer s operation Don t take off the cover except when you have to change the ribbon or to make an adjustment Removing the printer cover is easy Lift up the back of the cover to disengage the two tabs at the front and then lift it off the rest of the way To replace it just slide the tabs in at the front and lower it into place Figure 1 2 shows the proper posi tion and movement for both removing and replacing the cover 1 YE gt Figure 1 2 Remove the printer cover by lifting carefully M Removing the packing tube The printer is shipped with a protective spiral tube to keep the print head from being damaged in transit We have to remove this tube First remove the printer cover See the tube on the carriage rail Figure 1 3 Pull it off carefully Figure 1 3 Remove the protective tube from the carriage rail Up to this point we ve been clearing the decks for action so to speak Only one more thing left to do before we can start pri
74. ine combined both of these so that each character was printed 4 times Now that s pretty nice printing isn t it MIXING PRINT MODES We have learned how to use the various print modes in dividually and together Now we ll see how to combine them 39 more efficiently You have at your disposal a unique command that lets you choose any valid combination of print modes and pitch This is the Master Print mode command It looks like this ESC P n Here the value of n defines the print style to be selected The value of n can range from 0 to 255 which is the range of values that can be stored in one eight bit byte If you look at each bit in this byte yov ll find that each one represents a printing style variation Adding the binary values of the selected bits gives the value of n for a particular combination of print styles Table 3 10 shows the decimal values of the bits in the Master Print byte To calculate the value n for a particular combination of printing styles just add the values of the features that you want to combine Table 3 10 Values of mixing print styles for Master Print Elite print Proportional print Condensed print i Motu For example if you want to select elite expanded boldface print you would calculate the value of n like this Elite 1 Boldface 16 Expanded 32 n 49 The command would look like this CHR 27 CHR 49 40 To better understand the way the
75. ing Superscripts and subscripts Changing the print pitch Expanded print Condensed print Proportional printing Making words stand out Mixing print modes Formatting Text Al Lines and line spacing Starting a new line Reverse line feeds Changing the line spacing Moving down the page without a carriage return Page control Form feed Reverse form feed Changing the page length Top and bottom margins Setting left and right margins Horizontal and vertical tabs Horizontal tabs One time horizontal tabs Vertical tabs Vertical tab channels Centering and aligning text Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Special Features of the Printer 61 Now hear this Resetting the printer Putting your printer to sleep Printing the bottom of the sheet Backspace delete and cancel text Printing zeroes Immediate print Adjusting the width of space between characters Uni directional printing The seven bit dilemma Block graphics characters and special symbols International character sets Printing characters in the control code area Printing BIG characters The optional sheet feeder The macro control code Reading a hex dump Chapter 6 Creating Your Own Characters 81 Dot matrix printing The print matrix Defining your own characters Rule 1 Draft download characters are eight dots high Rule 2 Dots cannot overlap Add up each column of dots Assigning a value to your character Download character definition command Printing download characters Defining pro
76. ing lines advances the paper to the next vertical tab The printout is shown below 57 FIRST TAR SECOND Tak THIRD TAR FOURTH TAB 58 Add one more line to the program to demonstrate one more feature of vertical tabs 80 LPRINT CHR 11 FIFTH TAB Now when you run the program the first page looks just like before but line 80 sends one more lt VT gt than there are tabs This doesn t confuse your printer it advances the paper to the next tab position which happens to be the first tab position on the next page That s nice isn t it Table 4 9 Vertical tab commands Function Control code CHR 11 Advance paper to next tab posi tion ESC B CHRS x1 Set vertical tabs at n1 n2 etc CHR n2 CHR 0 Vertical tab channels Vertical tab channels are especially helpful in two situations The first occurs when you are writing a program to accompany a preprinted form that can accommodate various types of responces The second occurs when you create a multipage form or report with different vertical tabs on each page Table 4 10 Vertical tab channel commands Control code Set vertical tabs at n1 n2 etc ESC b CHR n0 CHR x1 as channel 0 CHR n2 CHRS 0 Select vertical channel 0 ESC CHR n0 You can store up to eight channels of tab stops They are numbered from 0 to 7 If you have already stored a set using lt ESC B command your printer has l
77. ings even easier Table 7 1 Calculating ni and n2 kr ranges from and n2 is Tto 255 256 to 511 512 10 767 768 to 1023 1024 to 1279 x 1024 x 1280 to 1535 x 1280 1536 to 1791 1536 1792 to 1920 x 1792 Specifying the graphics data Now that we ve told the printer how much data to expect we better figure out how to send that information Just as you do with download characters with dot graphics you have control over the firing of every single pin on the print head In Figure 7 1 you can see that we ve labelled each pin on the print head with a number as we did with download characters And speci fying pins to fire is done in the same way to fire the second pin from the top for instance send a CHR 64 Firing several pins at once is done in a similar fashion For example to print the first third and fourth dots add their values 128 32 16 to send this total CHR 176 This is one byte of graphics data it would replace m1 in our format statement 104 128 64 O 32 O 16 O 8 O 4 O 2 O 1 O not used Figure 7 1 Starting with the most significant bit at the top each pin of the print head is assigned a value which is a power of two A short program should demonstrate how to implement the graphics command The program below gave us this printout 10 Demo of dot graphics 20 PI 3 14159 30 1111 0 440 OPEN LPT1 AS 1 WIDTH 1 255 50 PRINT l
78. inter double spaces when it should single space then you probably need to turn DIP switch 1 8 on W Reverse line feeds Your printer has a unique capability it can move the paper up or down Its unique tractor design allows the paper to be fed in either direction without jamming This allows you to move around the page at will You can use this feature to print several columns of text side by side or print a graph and then move back up and insert descriptive legends As you experiment you re bound to come up with more uses The simplest form of reverse paper feeding is a reverse line feed The code is ESC gt lt LF which causes the paper to move down in effect moving the printing up one line A line used in a reverse line feed is the same size as a line in a regular line feed this is normally 1 6 inch When you change the line spac ing which you ll read about next you change it for both for ward and reverse line feeds Table 4 1 Line feed commands Control code Return print head to left margin CHR 13 CHR amp 10 ESC CHR amp 10 Changing the line spacing When you turn your printer on the line spacing is set to 6 lines per inch This is fine for most printing applications but sometimes you may want something different Your printer makes it easy to set the line spacing to whatever you want Try this program to see how easy it is to change the line spac ing 43 NEW 10
79. ion NOTICE Al rights reserved Reproduction of any part of this manual in any form what soever without STAR s express permission is forbidden The contents of this manual are subject to change without notice All efforts have been made to ensure the accuracy of the contents of this manual at the time of going to press However should any errors be detected STAR would be greatly appreciate being informed of them The above notwithstanding STAR can assume no responsibility for any errors in this manual Copyright 1986 Star Micronics Co Ltd Table of Contents Setting Up Your Printer Where shall we put it What have we here Removing the printer cover Removing the packing tube Installing the ribbon cartridge Getting to Know Your Printer Controls and parts of the printer Parts of the printer Controls and indicators Extra functions Other controls Selecting and loading paper Loading single sheets Loading sprocket feed paper Adjusting the print head Connecting the printer Extra functions with the control panel Self tests Hex dump Panel mode Italic mode Italic and Panel mode Setting print start position Setting the left and right margins Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Basic Printing 23 Some basics of BASIC A new language First steps ASCII codes and the CHR function Control codes The escape codes A note on command syntax Some special kinds of text Near Letter Quality characters Italic printing Underlin
80. is used for inser ting paper the next is for single sheets the third is for sprocket feed paper and the bottom one is used when adjusting the paper PAPER BAIL The bail is the movable bar that holds the paper against the platen Its position depends on the setting of the release lever DIP SWITCHES These are a set of ten switches and a set of six switches that are used in interfacing the printer to your computer There are also switches to set page length character style perforation skipping and selecting the international character sets See Appendix A for a complete list and explana tion SELECTING AND LOADING PAPER Your printer can handle the two basic types of paper single sheets stationery envelopes multipart business forms etc and continuous paper fan folded perforated paper This is a good place to tell you about the release lever which 11 you ll be using often This lever controls the pressure of the paper against the platen It has four settings 3 The top setting is used when you want to load paper in the printer b The second setting is for normal single sheets fh The third is for sprocket feed paper yl The bottom one is used when you want to release the paper completely to adjust it The paper bail holds the paper against the platen according to the setting of the release lever The bail is opened when the release lever is in the top position closed when the lever is
81. it is used for the descender data and the last seven bits are used for proportional widths We ll be discussing proportional character widths in detail later in this chapter for now we ll leave it at 11 The descender data was descussed earlier to use the top eight pins this bit should be 1 to use the bottom eight pins this bit should be 0 Figure 6 10 shows the bits of the attribute byte as we ll use them for our flask character By now you ve probably seen an easier way to determine the value of the attribute byte Instead of translating everything to binary merely assign the descender data a value of 128 the value of the first bit if you don t want descenders or 0 if you want descenders Then just add the descender data to the proportional width This way it s simply a matter of adding two decimal numbers In our case it s 128 11 139 50 O 000 1011 11 decimal Descender Starting Ending data print column print column Figure 6 10 The attribute byte m0 for our flask character Youll probably recognize mI m11 from the top of our layout grid That s right each column is described by one byte Now we ve got everything we need to download one character to the printer The complete command for our flask character is shown below CHR 27 CHR 38 CHR 0 CHR 60 CHR 60 CHR 139 CHR 2 CHR 5 CHR 8 CHR 241 CHR 0 CHRS 0 CHR 241 CHR 8 CHR 5 CHR 2 CHRS 0 Now let s send the i
82. line 40 sends a form feed 49 advance the paper to the top of the next form Line 50 then prints its message After you have run this program turn off the printer and ad just the top of form position When you turn the printer back on the page length will reset to its normal setting usually 11 in ches TOP AND BOTTOM MARGINS Many programs that you use a printer don t keep track of where they are printing on the page This causes a problem when you get to the bottom of a page because these programs just keep on printing right over the perforation This makes it very hard to read especially if a line happens to fall right on the perforation And if you separate the pages then you are really in trouble Of course your printer has a solution to this predicament This printer can keep track of the position on the page and advance the paper so that you won t print too near the perforation There are two commands to do this One controls the space at the top of the page and the other controls the space at the bottom of the page The control codes are given in the following table Table 4 5 Top and bottom margin commands ESC r CHRS ESC N CHR n Cancel top and bottom margins ESC O In both cases the value of n tells your printer how many lines to skip although there is a slight difference in the usage When you set the top margin with ESC r CHR n the value of n tells the printer what
83. line to start printing on When you set the bottom margin with ESC N CHR n the value of n tells the printer how many blank lines should be left at the bottom of the page Let s try a simple application to see how these margins work Enter this program which will print 150 lines without top and bottom margins 50 10 Demo of top and bottom margins 60 LPRINT CHR 12 3 form feed 70 FOR I 1 TO 150 80 LPRINT THIS IS LINE si 90 NEXT 1 110 LPRINT CHR 12 form feed 120 END When you run this program it will print 150 lines right down the page and across the perforations When it s done line 110 sends a form feed to advance to the top of the next page Look at the lines that have printed near the perforations Separate the sheets and see if any of the lines have been torn in half These are the problems that the top and bottom margins will solve Now add the following lines to your program Don t forget the semicolons or you won t get quite the same results that we did 20 Leave 6 blank lines at the bottom of page 30 LPRINT CHR 27 N CHR 6 40 Start top of page at line 6 50 LPRINT CHRS C27 3 2 CHRS CG 5 100 LPRINT CHR 27 0 clear top and bottom margins Now when you run the program your printer skip the first six lines and the last six lines on each page Always send a form feed after setting the top margin or it will not work on the first page printed That s because the top m
84. ly time we have thought about printing on a new line is when we didn t want it to happen We learned that putting a semicolon at the end of a BASIC line will not end the line of printing So somehow the computer telling the printer when to end one line and start another There are two codes that are used to end one line and start another They are carriage return CHR 13 and line feed CHR 10 Like the escape code they have been given ab breviations which you ll find many texts including this one lt CR gt and lt LF gt The codes are simple but their action is a little confusing especially with BASIC Carriage return is the easiest Each time that the printer receives a CHR 13 it returns the print head to the left margin It does not advance the paper if DIP switch 1 8 is on see below 42 Line feed is more complicated Each time the printer receives a CHR 10 it both advances the paper one line and returns the print head to the left margin ready to start a new line Now to add a little confusion most but not all versions of BASIC add a line feed CHR 10 to every carriage return CHR 13 that they send If your version of BASIC doesn t do this then you should turn DIP switch 1 8 off so that your printer will add the line feed for you When you have DIP switch 1 8 off the printer wil do the same thing when it receives a carriage return as it does when it receives a line feed If you find that your pr
85. mbers printed at the bottom of gach column If you look at each column individually you can see how the data numbers were calculated 97 1217131 ya 15M 1611711 1g Mig MaM M22 Ms Ma Ma Ma Me M7 Mg Mg MoM ASCII Code 60 Descender 1 Start column End column Mo Descender 128 Start 16 End Total 1st 4 8 224 16 62 200 16 0 Figure 6 13 Add the values of the dots in each box and line col umn and write the sum of each column at the bottom Now enter the following program and run it It has the data numbers for the NLQ flask character For a character of your own change the DATA numbers and the character definition position 10 LPRINT CHR 27 x1 20 LPRINT CHR 27 amp 3 CHR 0 CHR 60 CHR 60 30 FOR M 0 TO 22 4Q READ MM 50 LPRINT CHR MM 60 NEXT M 70 LPRINT 80 LPRINT CHR 27 j xO 90 END 100 DATA 139 2 5 8 241 0 0 241 8 Bs 25 110 we 65 Ba Tog Oy 0 224 165 8 0 30 120 DATA 139 124 0 66 4 64 36 16 2 16 12 0 130 a 1205 He Og Wy Oy OB Hy Os 0 58 140 DATA 139 46 16 2 60 0 48 oO 48 0 48 0 0 48 0 48 0 60 4 32 92 Ti 150 0 When you want to print the defined character you must select the NLQ mode first then select the download characters If you don t select the NLQ mode the download characters are not printed even you selected the download character s
86. n that calls or uses a group of nor mal instructions In computer programming macro instructions which are similar to subroutines save programmers a lot of time and effort Your printer s macro can save you a lot of time and effort also Here is how the printer s macro works You define macro by telling the printer what normal control codes are to be included in the macro Then you can use the macro any time that you want and the printer will do all the things that you included the macro definition You can include up to 16 codes in a single macro You can even use the macro to store a frequently used word or phrase There are two control codes for the macro one to define it and one to use it They are given in the Table 5 9 Table 5 9 Macro instruction commands Function Control code ESC codes you include CESC CHR 0 To see how this works we can build a macro that will reset the printing style to normal no matter what style it may be to start with The following program will define a macro to do this 10 LPRINT CHR 27 Start macro 20 LPRINT CHR 27 h CHR 0 Bie character off 30 LPRINT CHR 27 CHR 0 Select normal pica 40 LPRINT CHR 27 T Super amp subscripts off 50 LPRINT CHR 27 2 Set 1 6 inch line spacing 60 LPRINT CHR 27 a CHR 0 Left aligned printing 70 LPRINT CHR 30 end macro definition As the comments in the program
87. nce is The following table shows the control codes for getting into and out of boldface and emphasized modes Table 3 9 Print emphasis commands Control code ESC H ESC E ESC F 38 Try them now with this little program 10 Demo of boldface and emphasized 20 LPRINT CHR 27 G 30 LPRINT This line is BOLDFACE printing HO LPRINT CHR 27 E 50 LPRINT This line is BOLDFACE and EMPHASIZED 60 LPRINT CHR 27 H 70 LPRINT This line is EMPHASIZED printing 80 LPRINT CHR 27 F 90 LPRINT This line is normal printing 100 END Run this program The results will look like this This line is BOLDFACE printing This line is BOLDFACE and EMPHASIZED This line is EMPHASIZED printing This line is normal printing Line 20 turns on boldface with ESC G and line 30 prints a line of text In line 40 emphasized is turned on with ESC E Line 50 prints a line of text in boldface and emphasized Line 60 then turns boldface off with ESC H so that line 70 can print in emphasized only Finally line 80 turns emphasized off so your printer is set for normal printing Look closely at the different lines of printing In the line of boldface printing each character has been printed twice and they are moved down just slightly the second time they are printed In emphasized printing they are moved slightly to the right the second time your printer prints The last l
88. nformation to the printer The following program will send the character definitions for all three characters to the printer Turn off the printer and set DIP switch 2 1 off Then turn on the printer Enter the program and run it 10 LPRINT CHR 27 amp CHR 0 CHR 60 CHR 62 5 16 20 FOR N 60 TO 62 30 FOR M 0 TO 11 40 READ MM 50 LPRINT CHR MM 60 NEXT M 70 NEXT N 80 LPRINT 90 END 100 DATA 139 A hie ONL Os Grafy Ga 2 110 DATA 139 Iie OS 665 be 645 36 16 2 12 120 DATA io 46 16 2 60 0 48 0 48 0 When you run this program it looks like nothing happens That s OK We ll see why in just a moment Save this program We ll need it again shortly 91 PRINTING DOWNLOAD CHARACTERS You ve now defined and sent three characters to your printer But how do you know that If you try printing those characters now you don t get a flask car and gun Instead you get That s because the download characters are stored in a different part of the printer s memory To tell it to look in download character RAM instead of standard character ROM it requires another command ESC CHR n CHR 0 This command is used to select the download character set if n A4A9 or to select the standard character set if 48 Let s try it out Enter this program 10 LPRINT CHR 27 3 41 3CHR 0 20 LPRINT CHR 60 CHR 61 CHR 62 30 LPRINT CHR 27 3 0 CHR
89. nting install the ribbon cartridge E Installing the ribbon cartridge This printer uses a neat easy to change ribbon cartridge so you don t have to spend a lot of time threading a ribbon And get ting your hands all dirty to boot Telling you how to put in a ribbon is like explaining how to tie your shoelaces it takes a lot longer to tell than to do You can just follow the illustrations if you wish they ll tell you all you really need to know Or if you feel better following written instructions read on 1 Turn off the power and remove the printer cover 2 Now slide the print head gently to the center of the printer Warning The print head gets hot during operation so let it cool off before you touch it Figure 1 4 Press the cartridge into place until the holding springs snap into place 3 Using the guide holders as a fulcrum with the ribbon fac ing away from you as shown in Figure 1 4 lightly press the cartridge down until the two holder springs snap shut to hold the cartridge firmly in place 4 Check that the cartridge fits so that the drive pins engage the cartridge teeth 5 Gently slide the print head carriage manually all the way to your right or left until the ribbon automatically slips down into its proper place between the print head and the silver ribbon guide 6 Put the printer cover back on and you re finished A special switch on the printer prevents the printer from workin
90. nto the various notches The first step illustrated is the one most commonly used for single sheets of paper You shouldn t have any trouble finding the right gap setting for your paper If necessary experiment you ll soon find the best position for the paper you re using CONNECTING THE PRINTER Now that you have assembled your printer it s time to use it for what you bought it for print information from your com puter But first you have to connect it to your computer Please follow the instructions in the order listed below 17 1 Make sure both your computer and printer are turned off 2 Connect one end of the interface cable to the connector socket at the right rear of the printer as shown in Figure 2 10 3 Connect the other end of the cable to your computer as described in the computer manual Figure 2 10 This is how you connect the cable EXTRA FUNCTIONS WITH THE CONTROL PANEL There are many functions that are not directly specified on the control panel In this section we ll show you these extra functions 80 un am Italic mode Self test 2 Self test 1 Hex dump Panel mode Italic and Panel mode Figure 2 11 Extra functions while turning on the printer 18 E Self tests Your printer has two built in programs that print out sample lines of letters numbers and other characters to show you that everything s in good working order
91. o you can align them with the holes in the paper 6 Feed the end of the paper into the slot next to the platen cover plate 7 Fit the holes in the paper over the sprocket pins so the paper is even and clamp the sprocket units in place 8 Check that the paper is still positioned correctly and close the sprocket covers Figure 2 8 9 The Power indicator should be blinking Turn the platen knob to feed the paper until the indicator stops blinking 10 Now turn the platen knob the other way just a bit until the indicator starts blinking again 11 Set the release lever to the auto feed setting The printer will advance the paper automatically 12 When the paper stops set the release lever for sprocket feed paper again 13 Finally install the paper guide on the printer Figure 2 8 Now you re ready to roll Figure 2 8 Ready to run with sprocket feed paper 16 ADJUSTING THE PRINT HEAD The distance between the print head and the platen must be adjusted to accommodate papers of different thicknesses To make this adjustment move the adjustment lever which is under the printer cover and immediately in front of the release lever Figure 2 9 Pulling the adjustment lever towards you will widen the gap pushing it away from you will narrow the gap Adjustment lever Figure 2 9 The adjustment lever allows for different thicknesses of paper There are four positions you can feel the lever clicking i
92. of your printed image or even distort it you can for example make our circle print as an ellipse Experiment a little bit The main calculations for plotting the image are done in the subroutine starting at program line 600 This is where you put the formulas that you want to plot By changing just the lines after 600 with some creative mathematics you can plot any function limited only by your imagination Some examples are shown at the end of this section What the program section starting at line 600 actually does is 112 to calculate starting and ending points for a line in our circle the lines are very short sometimes the starting and ending points are the same The coordinates of the starting point of the line are assigned to variables X1 and Y1 The line ends at point X2 Y2 When these coordinates have been calculated a subroutine call is made to line 250 This subroutine calculates the coordinates of individual points along that line After these coordinates have been determined the subroutine at line 400 is called This routine turns on an individual dot in our array called BIT Keep in mind that no printing has been done yet the computer is still drawing the image on its graph paper in memory The way an individual dot is turned on is us ing the logical OR function in line 470 When all the points have been plotted in memory printing begins at line 130 We first set the line spacing to 6 72
93. one We need a little background first The BASIC in some computers changes ASCII codes before they send them to the printer If you run into problem because of this try this hex dump to check the ASCII codes First turn off the printer and run the following program Hold down both the Paper Feed key and Mode key and turn on the printer 10 FOR 1 0 TO 5 20 LPRINT CHR I 30 NEXT I 40 LPRINT 50 END 79 If your system passes the codes directly to the printer without changing them you will get like this You can print out the last remaining line in the print buffer by putting the printer off line with the On Line key oo 0i 02 OF 04 D5 06 07 06 09 OA Of DC OD OE OF 9 6a twee ees eee ae 10 19 19 1A 18 16 1D LE AF wee ee wee ees 20 2 28 29 ZA 2H 2C 2D SE BF k 70 J TO 39 SA TB JC 3D SE JF 6125456789 lt gt 40 48 49 4A 4f 4C 4D 4E 4F fA RCDEFGHIIJELMNO 50 58 59 5A SB SC SD SE SF PORSTUVWXYZEN37_ 60 6B 69 6A 6B C 4D GE oF abcdefghi jl mana 70 768 79 7A 7B 7C 7D 7E 7F parstuvwxyz i BO BS BA BB SC BD BE BF _ ne eww nen wre nee 90 98 99 FA FB 9C FD 9E PF nce ee ne AQ AB AA AB AC AD AE AF 0 cucu nc cece BO BL RB Be BF BA BH BC BD BE BF naw nn es nnn co C1 C2 C3 C4 CS C7 Ce CA CB CC CD CE CF aanenanuasonwanso DO D1 D2 25 D4 DS D 7 D8 09 DA DB DC DD DE DF awe wae nace EO E1 E EZ E4 E
94. oo For instance sending a 7 sounds the printer s bell Taken together these numbers and their meanings make up the ASCII code pronounced ask key which stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange There are ASCII codes for all the letters of the alphabet upper case and lower case 0 to 9 most punctuation marks and some but not all of the functions of the printer There are a number of different ways to represent an ASCII code depending on how you are using it For example the ASCII codes for the letter A are 65 decimal or amp H41 hex adecimal Or you can just call it A Appendix B shows all of the ASCII codes BASIC uses the CHR function to represent ASCII characters and many functions To print the letter A we 26 would enter LPRINT CHR 65 To make the printer s bell sound we would LPRINT CHR amp 7 In general we print a character by entering LPRINT CHR ASCI code to the printer We can also use hex ASCII codes Although we use only decimal ASCII codes in this manual you should understand at least what a hex code is Hex is short for hexadecimal and refers to a base 16 number the numbers we use in everyday life are base 10 Since the hex system needs 16 digits it uses the numerals 0 through 9 and also the letters A through F You can always tell that a number is in hexadecimal by the amp H im mediately preceding it The ASCII code for the letter A
95. oth line 30 and line 50 end with semicolons This prevents the normal line feed from occurring The lt ESC j CHR z command works the same way except that the paper moves in the opposite direction Try this simple change to your program and see what a difference it makes H0 One time reverse line feed 50 LPRINT CHRS 27 3 j3 5CHRS 100 LINE NUMBER 2 LINE NUMBER LINE NUMBER LINE NUMBER bh 52 PI he a 2 47 PAGE CONTROL Now that we have seen how to control line spacing we can go on to page control positioning the printing on the page and ad justing the paper length E Form feed The simplest forms control code is the form feed Form feed or lt FF gt is CHR 12 and causes the printer to move the paper to the top of the next sheet Try it by changing lines 40 and 50 to this 4o form feed 50 LPRINT CHR 12 Before you run the program turn your printer off and adjust the paper so that the top of the sheet is even with the top of the ribbon guide on the print head then turn the printer back on If you don t remember how to do this review Chapter 2 When you run the program the results will look like this LINE NUMBER 1 1 l a O EESE EEE EES LINE NUMBER Z O E NUMBER 4 M The form feed CHR 12 in line 50 caused the printer to move to the top of a new page before printing the last two lines E Reverse form feed Just as your printer can perform a reverse line
96. p SIS Tr TT By 3 SO DATA ISS O CC O SON O Oy O Row 2 DATA Os O 6052557255 525552555295 LAI 5 DATA Ts Ts Ts Oe S3 35 23bs1 935244 DATA DMO O 05 040 05 Os 0 0 1 DATA 121 253 253 255 255 255 143 Ts Ts T DATA 31 253 252 248 248 240 192 0 7 15 BATA lt i Us oe Ta Ba Oa Oy O Or O DATA Os 205 Os Oy 03 Os Op O 0 DATA O lt 05 605255 52555255 52955 255 1434 15 DATA Ts ts J Fe Se By LSS 283 DATA ANO HO Oy O Oy O Os Oy Our D Row 3 DATA 0 31 31 3 129 128 192 192 192 192 DATA 192 224 224 224 224 255 255 240 5 5 DATA OSS lS 05 205 Oy OOD DATA 255 255 193 128 128 128 128 192 224 2H0 DATA 252 255 255 255 127 63 31 7 7 31 DATA 251 252 245 224 128 0O O 3s T 7 DATA To Ss OS O Oe Oa Oy Oe 0 S DATA 0 31 31 3 129 128 192 192 192 192 DATA 192 221 221 2214 2214 240 255 255 255 255 DATA 255112327 0 O O Os Ok O 0 0 Row 4 DATA 0 248 248 240 224 224 112 112 56 56 DATA 56 56 56 120 120 240 240 224 224 192 DATA 128 Os 0 UO Gs 0 292 224 210 0 DATA 240 248 248 248 120 120 56 56 56 56 DATA 48 112 224 224 224 224 240 240 248 248 DATA 120 120 56 56 56 56 120 240 224 224 DATA 192 128 Oy Or Oe Oge Dz 0 DATA 0 218 DUG ONO pod 312 112 56 56 DATA 56 56 56 120 120 240 240 224 224 192 DATA 128 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 108 340 350 360 370 380 390 400 410 420 430 4H0 450 460 470 480 49
97. portional characters Defining NLQ download characters Dot Graphics 101 Comparing dot graphics with download characters Using the dot graphics commands Specifying the number of columns of dots Specifying the graphics data Combining text and graphics Printing a design or logo Plotting with your printer How the program works High resolution graphics Compatibility with existing software More graphics programming tips Redefining alternate graphics codes 9 pin graphics mode Caring for Your Printer 123 Cleaning the printer Replacing the ribbon Replacing the print head DIP Switch Settings 131 Switch functions ASCII Codes and Conversion 135 Chart Character Fonts 143 Roman characters Standard characters Set 1 and Set 2 Special characters Set 2 only International characters Italic characters Standard characters Set 1 and Set 2 Special characters Set 2 only Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C Function Codes 165 Commands to control print style Font style controls Font pitch controls Special print modes Controlling the vertical print position Line feed and reverse line feed Form feed and related commands Top bottom margins and vertical tabs Controlling the horizontal print position Download character commands Dot graphics commands Macro instruction commands Other commands Command Summary in Numeric 209 Order Technical Specifications 213 The Parallel Interface 217 Functions of
98. r computers use their own brand of BASIC To use an Apple 11 enter the following PR l PR l LIST PRINT Hello PR 0 PR 0 The PR 1 tells the Apple to send everything to the printer the LIST or PRINT command sends it and the PR 0 returns 25 output to the screen Other computers notably the Commodore C 64 require you to open the printer as a numbered device then to direct output to that device For example you might type the following to print Hello or to list a program in the C 64 s memory OPEN4Y 4 OPENLY 4 CMD4 CMD4 LIST PRINT Hello CLOSE4 CLOSEY Here the first line says that the printer is device number 4 the second directs output to it the third does the printing and the last line closes down device number 4 Appendix H gives more information about listing programs on the various computers Find the part that applies to your com puter and try it Now that we know how to address the printer let s try listing a BASIC program Load a program into memory ready to pro gram printer operation just as soon as we learn a little bit about the ASCII codes ASCII codes and the CHR function You talk to your computer in BASIC but your computer and your printer talk to each other in what are known as ASCII codes In the ASCII code each number from 0 to 255 has a par ticular meaning 36 for example makes the printer print a dollar sign Some numbers cause the printer to do other things t
99. reset to restore the printer to the power on condition You can also set the printer to print in one direction for one line only by using the ESC command This command im mediately moves the printhead to the left margin and then prints the remainder of the line from left to right E The seven bit dilemma Certain computers but not the IBM PC fortunately don t have the capability to send eight bits on their parallel interface They can only send seven bits This would make it impossible for these computers to use this printer s block graphics characters and special symbols if our engineers hadn t thought of a solution All of these characters have ASCII codes greater than 127 which means that the eighth bit must be on to use them The solution lies in the three control codes given in the following table 68 Table 5 3 Eighth bit controls Function Turn the eighth bit ON ESC y Turn the eighth bit OFF ESC Accept the eighth bit as is fro ESC the computer E Block graphics characters and special symbols Besides the upper and lower case letters and symbols that we are by now familiar with your printer has a whole different set of characters that are for special uses These characters include block graphics for drawing forms and graphs and special sym bols for mathematical engineering and professional uses The special characters are included in two character sets The charact
100. ribbon Tractor feed unit Power switch Power cord Figure 2 1 Front and rear views of the printer TRACTOR FEED UNIT The drive gear and sprockets of the tractor feed unit move sprocket feed paper through the printer PLATEN This is the rubber cylinder that carries paper to the print head INTERFACE CONNECTOR On the back of the printer this connector is used to connect your computer to the printer Controls and indicators Now let s take a tour around the controls starting with the control panel on the right There are seven indicators and four keys on the control panel _ 80 DRAFT 96 Te ms POWER BOLD 136 Tr EER ON LINE 80 NLQ Figure 2 2 The control panel POWER INDICATOR Glows red when the power is on or blinks when the printer is out of paper or some other error occurs BOLD KEY and INDICATOR Pressing this key selects boldface printing DRAFT INDICATORS 80 96 136 Glows green to in dicate the number of characters per line when the printer is in the draft mode set by the Mode key or the software control NLQ INDICATOR Glows green when the printer is printing in the Near Letter Quality NLQ mode set by the Mode key or the software control MODE KEY Changes the print mode every time it is pressed PAPER FEED KEY Advances the paper one line at a time when the On Line indicator is off If you hold the key down
101. rtional spacing works 10 Demo of proportional printing 20 LPRINT CHR 27 M 30 LPRINT This line is NORMAL ELITE printing 40 LPRINT CHR 27 p1 50 LPRINT This line is PROPORTIONAL ELITE 60 LPRINT CHR 27 P 70 LPRINT This line is PROPORTIONAL PICA 80 LPRINT CHR 27 3 po 90 LPRINT This line is NORMAL PICA printing 100 END 37 When you run this program you should get this This line is NORMAL ELITE printing This line is FROFORTIONAL ELITE This line is PROPORTIONAL FICA This line is NORMAL PICA printing Line 20 selects the elite pitch and line 40 turns on the propor tional printing with ESC p 1 Line 50 prints a line with pro portional elite pitch Then line 60 selects the pica pitch so that line 70 prints a line with proportional pica pitch Finally line 80 resets the proportional printing and line 90 prints a line in nor mal pica pitch NOTE When you change the print pitch by the MODE key on the control panel this proportional spacing should be automatically cancelled MAKING WORDS STAND OUT Your printer has very good print density when it s just print ing regularly But sometimes you may want something to stand out from the rest of the page This printer provides two ways to do this boldface and emphasized print Both of these go over the characters twice but they use slightly different methods to darken the characters Let s try them and see what the dif fere
102. t like many of the other codes you have learned the com mand starts with an escape sequence ESC in this case This is followed by CHR 0 which specifies normal density the other densities are described later in this chapter But unlike the other codes there can be any number of graphics data bytes following the command That s where n1 and n2 come in they are used to tell the printer how many bytes of graphics data to expect W Specifying the number of columns of dots To figure the values of mJ and n2 you ll need to figure out how wide your graphics image will be remember that there are 60 columns of dots per inch in normal density Then comes the fun part converting one number the number of columns of dots into two Why is it necessary to use two numbers to tell the printer the number of graphics codes to expect Because the 103 largest number we can send in one byte that s what the BASIC CHR function sends one byte is 255 And with the normal density graphics it s possible to have a graphics image as wide as 480 dots So to figure out how many columns of graphics data to expect your printer multiplies n2 by 256 and adds the value of n1 to the product If you divide the number of columns by 256 then n2 is the quotient and n1 is the remainder why not let your computer figure it out for you if the number of columns is assigned to variable X then n1 X MOD 256 and n2 INT X 256 Table 7 1 might make th
103. t off with ESC W 0 Table 3 6 Expanded print commands ESC W 0 E Condensed print Each of the print pitches also can be condensed to its normal width This is called condensed print Try this program to see how it works 4 10 Demo of condensed print 20 LPRINT Demonstration of 30 LPRINT CHR 15 3 LO LPRINT CONDENSED 50 LPRINT CHR 18 60 LPRINT printing Demonstration of CONDENSED printing Condensed print set with CHR 15 stays on until you turn it off with CHR 18 Note that you don t need to put an ESC in front of the CHR 15 although ESC CHR 15 works just the same 35 Table 3 7 Condensed print commands Condensed ON CHR 15 or ESC CHR 15 Condensed OFF CHR 18 By combining expanded print and condensed print with the two pitches this printer has eight different character widths available Enter this program to see how the print pitches expanded print and condensed print can be combined 10 Demo of various print pitches 20 LPRINT CHR 15 30 LPRINT CHR 27 M HO LPRINT This line is CONDENSED ELITE pitch 50 LPRINT CHR 27 3 P 60 LPRINT This line is CONDENSED PICA pitch 70 LPRINT CHR 18 80 LPRINT CHR 27 M 90 LPRINT This line is NORMAL ELITE pitch 100 LPRINT CHRS 27 3 PR 110 LPRINT This line is NORMAL PICA pitch 120 GPRINT CHRS 27 s Wi 130 LPRINT CHR 15 140 LPRINT CHR 27 M 150 LPRIN
104. t program again Your results look like Figure 6 11 HSA CO k 70123456789 5 AS GABCDEFGHIIKLMNOPOQRSTUVWXYZON I iklmno paorstuvwsyz 1 AL BURA AQ Riga THER Noa Mod LH lb bleed ee eee de Mx Lo pr SOs oven 2s SLPS 5 yn Figure 6 11 Printout of the download character set into which all the ASCII characters have been copied and the and have been changed To demonstrate how to use these characters let s use this character set to print a small graph This program which has been built around the first program in this chapter will do just that 10 LPRINT CHR 27 3 CHR 0 CHR 0 CHR 0 20 LPRINT CHR 27 amp CHR 0 CHR 60 CHR 62 30 FOR N 60 TO 62 40 FOR M 0 TO 11 50 READ MM 60 LPRINT CHR MM 93 70 NEXT M 80 NEXT N 90 LPRINT 100 DATA 1305 Bg Ss COON Cy 10 2425 8 2 5 0 110 DATA 139 124 O 66 Hy FE 16 2 I6 l2 0 120 DATA 139 46 165 2 60y Oy 485 Oy H8 0 48 0 130 LPRINT CHR 27 3 D CHR 11 CHR 0 140 LPRINT CHR 27 h 3CHR 1 150 LPRINT U S EXPORTS 160 LPRINT CHR 27 3 h CHR 0 170 LPRINT CHR 27 21 5CHR 0 180 LPRINT AUTOS CHR 9 190 FOR I 4 TO 9 3 STEP 4 200 LPRINT CHR 61 210 NEXT I 220 LPRINT 230 LPRINT CHEMICALS CHR 9 POR T lt 4 TO 8 7 STEP 250 LPRINT CHR 60 260 NEXT I 270 LPRINT 280 LPRINT G
105. tential graphics problems A redefining code allows you to change the density for graphics programs that use one of the four alternate codes The 9 pin graphics mode allows you to use all nine pins on each line and thus speed up screen dumps Table 7 4 More graphics commands Redefine the graphics mode lt ESC n0 nl 00000 CESC CHR n0 nl 2 pin graphics AIMA Redefining alternate graphics codes Your printer provides a command to redefine one of the alter nate graphics modes K L Y or Z so that it represents any other of the seven graphics modes The command is ESC nO nl where 70 is one of the four letters K L Y or Z and n1 is one of the numbers used with the ESC com mand 0 to 7 There are several instances in which you may use this sequence The first occurs if you have written a program to be printed in one graphics mode and now want to print it in another If you have used concatenation to store your graphics command in one Short character string that will not be difficult You can simply change the mode number or alternate code in the definition of the character string A second time you can make good use of the redefining code occurs when you want to change a program in which you have not concatenated the graphics codes Using the ESC se quence allows you to change every instance of your graphics command by entering only one line
106. there was an easy trick for figuring the attribute byte earlier you still don t need to know a thing about binary arithmetic Merely multiply the starting column by 16 add the ending coulmn number and add 128 if the character is not a descender If you prefer a formula descender 128 start 16 end One thing to remember about defining proportional characters a character cannot be wider than the specified width That seems obvious enough For example if you specify a width of 6 for a character starting in column 1 and ending in column 6 the seventh through eleventh of dots if you specified any will not print You must however send information even if it is 0 for those columns when you defined a character your printer expects eleven characters following the ESC amp CHR 0 n1 n2 mO sequence In most cases the width you select should actually be one dot wider than the number of columns that the character actually oc cupies This is so that there will be a space of one dot between characters when you print them If you specify a width which is exactly the same as the number of columns in the character definition the characters will touch when they print this is sometimes desirable for border characters or for large download characters that are more than eleven dots wide DEFINING NLQ DOWNLOAD CHARACTERS In the previous sections we have learned how to define and print the draft download characters As
107. to do it once It doesn t make much sense to set up a tab to use only one time There must be an easier way and of couse there is The solution is called a one time tab Table 4 8 show the com mands Table 4 8 One time horizontal tabs Absolute horizontal tab ESC CHR n1 CHR n2 Relative horizontal tab ESC N CHR n1 2 55 The aboslute horizontal tab command moves the print head to a specified position on the page The position that you want the print head to move to meaured from the left margin is specified by the values of n1 and n2 in 1 60 inch units using the formula 727 n2 x 256 Try this program to see how this works 10 Demo of absolute horizontal tabs 20 FOR I 60 TO 70 STEP 2 30 LPRINT 5 HO LPRINT CHR 27 CHR I CHR 0 50 LPRINT Horizontal tab 60 NEXT I 70 END In this program the print head is positioned before the H in Horizontal is printed GO HEHE Horizontal taba Om HHA Horizontal tab Gf HE Horizontal tab tHE Horizontal tab GE Ht Horizontal tab ZO debt Horizontal tab The relative horizontal tab command can move the print head right form the current position The formula for calculating how much the print head moves is the same as in the absolute horizontal tab command However the units by which the print head actually moves vary in 1 120 inch units Try this program to see how this works 10 FOR 2
108. ump 1 Plug in the printer don t turn it on yet 2 Insert a sheet of paper as you did for the self tests 3 While holding down both the Paper Feed and Mode keys turn on the power switch E Panel mode As you ll learn in Chapter 5 this printer has many software controls But if you want to print in one mode ignoring the con trol codes the Panel mode takes effect for you To set the Panel mode follow the procedures 1 Plug in the printer don t turn it on yet 2 While holding down the Mode key turn on the power switch Notice that this mode stays on until you turn off the printer E Italic mode Sometimes you may want to print with italic characters with Draft mode as the power on default You can set the Italic mode with the following procedures 1 Plug in the printer don t turn it on yet 2 While holding the Bold key turn on the power switch This mode stays on until you send the cancel command to your printer This mode re activates when you send the reset command to your printer Italic and Panel mode You can combine with the Panel mode and the Italic mode at a time To set these modes at a time follow the pro cedures below 20 1 Plug in the printer don t turn it on yet 2 While holding both the Mode and Bold keys turn on the power switch Forward micro feed 1 Reverse micro feed kk 80 ary DRAFT 96 To POWER BOLD 136 T PATE
109. ustifying lines by incresing the space be tween each character Wl Uni derectional printing Uni directional printing is a big word that means printing in one direction only Your printer normally prints when the print head is moving in both directions But once in a while you may have an application where you are more concerned about how the vertical lines align than with how fast it prints This printer lets you make this choice The table below shows the commands for controlling how this printer prints Table 5 2 Printing directin commands ESC C Try this program to see the difference that printing in one direction makes 10 Demo of uni directional printing 20 LPRINT CHR 27 1 30 FOR I 1 TO 10 AO LPRINT 50 NEXT I 60 LPRINT LPRINT 70 LPRINT CHRS 27 UI 80 FOR I 1 TO 10 90 LPRINT 100 NEXT I 110 LPRINT CHR 12 CHR 27 67 Here is what you will get The top line is printed bi directional ly and the bottom is printed uni directionally You will have to look hard because there isn t much difference Let s analyze the program Line 20 sets the line spacing to 7 72 of an inch so that the characters that we print will touch top to bottom Lines 30 50 print 10 vertical line characters Then line 70 sets one direction printing and the vertical lines are printed again Finally line 110 sends a form feed to advance the paper to the top of a new page and then uses the master
110. we started to define macro in line 10 Line 20 cancels the big character printing Line 30 sets the normal pica and also this command cancels the propor 78 tional pitch condensed print expanded print boldface em phasized and the underlining Line 40 cancels the superscripts and the subscripts Line 50 sets the line spacing to 1 6 inch and line 60 sets the left aligned printing Then line 70 ends the macro definition This printer will remember this macro until the power is turned off or until a new macro is defined A macro can hold up to 16 bytes characters of information The one that we defined contains thirteen Now that you have defined a macro let s see how to use it This program will print one line using several printing features Then it calls the macro in line 60 When line 80 prints the style is plain vanilla because the macro has reset it 10 LPRINT CHR 27 Q CHR 4O 20 LPRINT CHR 27 3 a 3CHR 2 30 LPRINT CHR 27 1 4Q LPRINT CHR 27 3 h CHR 1 50 LPRINT TESTING ABCD OGO EPRIN CHRS 27 34 2 CARS Ls 70 LPRINT TESTING ABCD 80 END TESTING ABCD tmnt asttnta vm va scosernscenee avmptseespeasenanecsenececeimmemient vetene ree TESTING ABCD E Reading a hex dump We ve seen how to make a hex dump in Chapter 1 but it s not really clear what we can do with
111. you ve learned in Chapter 3 you can print NLQ characters You can also define the download characters with NLQ mode Since NLQ characters use many more dots than draft characters defining NLQ download characters is more complex than designing draft ones If you use the grid and the program in this section however you will be able to design your own NLQ characters 5 56 Because the NLQ characters can use as many as 16 dots ver tically and 11 dots horizontally you plan your designs on a dif ferent grid than the one you used for draft characters Make up some grids photocopy Figure 6 12 if you wish and get ready to be creative My M2 M3 M4 Ms Me M7 Ma Mg MyoM 177 TI 1111 161 19 7 7 11 1gMa9M 2122 Figure 6 12 Use this grid or one similar to it to define your own NLQ characters As you noticed when the NLQ characters are printed they are printing in twice the first line of data is printed the paper is moved up a distance of 1 2 dot then the second data line is printed So we ve written the numbers on the horizontal lines To calculate the data numbers for this column you see which dots are used in the box and add their values together Then you go down the dots on the horizontal lines and add their values together as shown in Figure 6 13 Now we ll show you how to use the NLQ character definition with a flask as shown in Figure 6 13 Figure 6 13 shows the design drawn on a grid and the data nu

Star Micronics NX-10 User's Manual

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