Control Codes
Character Sets and Code Pages
The Epic 880TM Printer is primarily intended to be used in Unicode based systems. However to provide legacy support, the printer supports 8 bit and double byte ASCII encoding with code pages.
When not using Unicode or double byte encoding, the printer is restricted to the 8 bit ASCII character set. To support international languages, the characters that are assigned to each of the 256 possible locations can be remapped to any character in the Unicode standard. Typically, the first 32 characters are reserved for control characters. The next 72 are typically fixed to alpha numeric and punctuation. The upper 128 characters are typically redefined to characters that support the specific language or country. These mappings are generally referred to as codepages.
The Epic 880TM provides several legacy commands to select a country code or codepage maps. However, they all simply select an ASCII to Unicode translation map. Several predefined mappings to provide legacy support are internal to the printer, but the majority of the maps are placed in the printer’s file system. This allows any preexisting codepage mapping to be defined as well as the ability to define custom mappings unique to your application.
Codepage description files
The format of the codepage description file is somewhat flexible. The basic format is that each line will specify an ASCII character ID and the Unicode character that is to appear in that ASCII ID location.
The file format is one character per line with the first value being the ASCII ID and the second value being the Unicode address. The file should be something like this:
0x00 | 0x0000 | # NULL | |
0x01 | 0x0001 | # START OF HEADING | |
0x02 | 0x0002 | # START OF TEXT | |
0x03 | 0x0003 | # END OF TEXT | |
... |
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or |
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\Language = USA |
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\Code Page = 437 |
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0x00 | 0x0000 | ; 0 | NULL |
0x01 | 0x263A | ; 9786 | WHITE SMILE |
0x02 | 0x263B | ; 9787 | BLACK SMILE |
0x03 | 0x2665 | ; 9829 | BLACK HEART SUIT |
0x04 | 0x2666 | ; 9830 | BLACK DIAMOND SUIT |
0x05 | 0x2663 | ; 9827 | BLACK CLUB SUIT |
... |
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or |
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0 0 | ; NULL |
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19786 ; WHITE SMILE
29787 ; BLACK SMILE
39829 ; BLACK HEART SUIT
49830 ; BLACK DIAMOND SUIT
59827 ; BLACK CLUB SUIT
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