Star Micronics NP-IO manual Designing Your OWN NLQ Characters

DESIGNING YOUR OWN NLQ CHARACTERS

As you have probably noticed, NLQ characters are printed by two passes of the print head. Half of the character is printed on the first pass, and the remainder on the second pass. The paper is rolled up half a dot height in between passes to let the print head print dots on the second pass that overlap the previous dots, in order to fill in the spaces and produce denser characters.

Fundamentally, the process to define and print downloaded NLQ characters is the same as for draft characters, except that you must design the character with the two passes of the print head in mind.

Use the grid in Figure 6-6 to help plot the data. Due to the two-pass process, NLQ characters can contain up to 16 dots ver- tically. ml to ml1 are the data for the first pass, and ml2 to m22 are the data for the second pass.

128
128
84	ASCII	Code:
64
32	Descender:
32
18	Start	column:
1s
s	End column:
8
4	MO =	Descender	* 128 +	(Start *	16) +	End
4
2
2
1
1
TOlJ
1st
2nd
I						1
Figure 6-6.	Use this grid (or one	similar to	it) to	define	your	own
NLQ characters.

To make the character data easier to calculate, put the first

pass dots inside the boxes on the grid when you are designing