Unicode and Fonts
Stacked or Linked fonts
The Epic 880TM also uses a font stacking technology where fonts are linked together. This means that as each character is looked up, the first font in the stack containing the character is then printed. For example, if a customer would like to replace several standard characters with custom characters, a user defined font can be provided that would, if first in the link, replace the characters n the standard font.
It may also be desirable to stack fonts to provide a precedent for how individual characters are looked up. For example:
•An application may wish to alter the appearance of several characters for security.
•It might be necessary to define a group of special symbols for a specific application.
•It might be necessary to supplement a font with special characters like OCR characters.
To provide this flexibility, the Epic 880TM has the ability to link up to 8 fonts together. When this is done, the first font in the link is searched first. If the character is not defined, the next font in the link is searched. This process is continued until the character is found or the last font is searched.
There are two ways to define a linked font. This first is to define a default linked font in the POR.INI file. If it link font is defined in the POR.INI file, it will be selected as the default power on font. Selecting font 0 will select the linked font provided that a link font is defined.
It is also possible to dynamically define a linked font. This requires that the fonts to be linked be aliased to a font id in the POR.INI file. Defining a linked font does not necessarily activate it. If the linked font was not already active, it must be selected by selecting font 0.
Font Storage
The Epic 880TM supports a Flash file system used to store fonts, custom graphic and custom macros. A file system interface is provided for this system, where the host application may download files. In addition, TransAct Technologies provides a file loading tool that runs on Windows® based systems.
To allow flexible and easy support for all kinds of fonts, fonts are stored in the Epic 880TM printer as a standard font file. These files are typically not visible to the user, however; TransAct Technologies provides a support tool that will allow the user to load their own font directly from Windows and change the way fonts are printed. It is also possible for the host application to load fonts into the printer.
The printer can contain up to 99 unique and selectable fonts. Any font may be selected at any time. In addition up to 8 fonts may be linked or stacked together. Some standard character size and character pitch commands are supported as legacy commands. The appearance of the print using those commands has been optimized using the TransAct WGL4 font. If you elect to use your own font, or the GB18030 font, you may wish to use the scalable font control commands to select the character size and spacing rather than the legacy commands.
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