Epson 4100 manual Using Basic to Send Commands, Using Batch Files to Send Commands

130 Universal Control Commands

USING BASIC TO SEND COMMANDS

Using BASIC, the control sequence to set the top margin to line 6 in DEC emulation can be sent with the following program:

ASCII sequence:	ESC	[	6	r
Control sequence in decimal:		27	91	54	114
BASIC program:	LPRINT CHR$(27);"[6r";

To set the left margin to Column 6 and the right margin to Column 76 in IBM Proprinter XL emulation, the following program could be used:

ASCII sequence:	ESC	X	!	L
Control sequence in decimal:		27	88	6	76
BASIC program:	LPRINT CHR$(27);"X";CHR$(6);CHR$(76);

USING BATCH FILES TO SEND COMMANDS

If you are running DOS on your computer, you can create batch files to send the necessary data stream to the printer. For example, to select 12- pitch, single-strike printing in Epson emulation, the control command is ESC ! (1). (The parentheses around "1" identify this as parameter 1, which in the Epson emulation is decimal or hexadecimal 1— not the ASCII character 1, which would be decimal 49 or hexadecimal 31.) In this example, we make use of the fact that, in Epson and IBM #1 character sets, data byte value 155 is also the ESC control code. Create a batch file by typing the following at the DOS prompt:

COPY CON 12PITCH.BAT

ECHO ¢!^A > PRN

^Z

•The first line tells the computer to copy the lines that follow into the file named "12PITCH.BAT". The ".BAT" extension identifies the file as a batch file.