Black Box PC118C-R2 manual Advanced Features, Command Pass-Through

CHAPTER 7: Advanced Features

7. Advanced Features

The HPIIISi Twinax Card has several advanced features for accessing special printer functions that are not normally available on the IBM 3812-1 printer. These features, which include command pass-through, user- defined strings and fonts, color and bar-code printing, and a proprietary graphics language, are described in separate sections of this chapter.

7.1 Command Pass-Through

The command pass-through (CPT) feature lets you access all of the built-in features of your printer, even if these features aren’t normally available through the host software. With command pass-through, you can place printer-specific command sequences into the data sent to the printer.

The Card recognizes these special sequences and “passes the command through” to the printer. Follow these steps to use command pass-through:

1.Find the command for the print feature in the printer’s manual.

2.Convert the printer command to hexadecimal.

3.Type “&%” (or the alternate CPT-start delimiter, as defined by host/PC-download command 01—see the entry for this command in Section 5.3) in the document at the point you want the feature to take effect. This signals the start of the print feature. Type in the printer command that turns the feature ON, then type “&%” (or the alternate CPT-end delimiter as defined by host/ PC-download command 02— see the entry for this command in Section 5.3). You may enter a space between the hexadeci-mal code pairs to make the printer command easier to read, but do not put spaces between the delimiters and the hexadecimal characters.

4.Move the cursor to the point in the text that you want to end the print feature. Type in the start delimiter, followed by the printer command that turns the feature OFF, then the end delimiter.

For example:

On HP printers, the command “[ESC]&d0D” (where [ESC] stands for the escape character) begins underlining, and “[ESC]&d@” ends underlining. First, convert the “start underlining” command to the hexadecimal 1B 26 64 30 44 and the “end underlining” command to 1B 26 64 40. Then, as- suming the delimiter is the default “&%” (hex 50 6C), insert the command in your text like this:

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