Unicode and Fonts
100-88002 Rev B Page 197
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.