SECTION 11
TRANSPARENCY MODES
General Information
Most ASCII and EBCDIC printers have features that are not available on IBM printers. If the user’s host application is aware that the destination of the data may be a
A transparent printer command, or transparency, consists of a trigger (character code) followed by the hexadecimal command that will activate a particular printer feature. The trigger alerts the protocol converter that the data that follows it is a printer command that should be sent directly to the printer without translation.
If the appropriate form of transparency is activated, the ULTRA will recognize the trigger and respond appropriately to that form of transparency. The ULTRA can use standard IBM 35h, Xerox 36h and Xerox Metacode transparency. The ULTRA provides its own version of transparency, called pseudo transparency mode (PTM). It also is capable of supporting
Note: If the user or the user’s application embeds transparent or pseudo transparent strings in the data stream, Option #1 — Column Width should be set to 0 (infinite line length), Option #2 — Lines Per Page should be set to 0 (infinite page length), and Option #15 — Bold Print Emulation should be set to C (none). Otherwise, unpredictable formatting errors may occur. For more information, refer to Section 12 — DisplayWrite 370 Support.
IBM 35 Hex Transparency Mode
This form of transparency is valid only in SCS data streams. In IBM 35h transparency, the trigger character is 35h, and it indicates the start of the transparent data stream. The 35h is followed by a count byte that indicates the length, in bytes, of the transparent data stream, not counting the count byte itself. The count byte is followed by the actual data to be sent. For instance, the following code will send a Xerox 4045 printer reset command (Esc+X) using 35h transparency:
35031B2B58
