Epson Apex-80 User-definedCharacters, Defining Your Own Characters

Chapter 5

User-defined Characters

The Apex80 has several hundred different characters stored in its ROM (Read Only Memory Although this number includes draft, italic, international, Character Graphics, and NLQ (Near Letter Quality) characters, sometimes you may want to have a few more. For those occasions when you need a special character or a few letters in a different typeface, the Apex80 allows you to create your own characters and print them just as if they were ordinary letters.

Defining Your Own Characters

The printout below displays a few such characters to give you an idea of what can be done, but remember that these characters are truly user-defined; you create what you need or want.

The procedure for designing a character is a simple three-step process:

•Plan your character

•Run one program to test your work and calculate the required DATA numbers

•Run another program to put the character in your printer’s RAM (Random Access Memory) for use whenever you need it.

Because the high-resolution NLQ mode uses many more dots per character than the draft mode, defining NLQ characters is somewhat more complex than defining draft characters. You can find the programs for defining NLQ characters at the end of this chapter.

After you have created your own characters with these programs, certain keys that you seldom use generate the user-defined characters. For example, you can type ( to print .

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