Pica Printing

The first exercise is a simple three-line program to print a sample line of characters in pica, the standard width. Enter this program:

40 FOR X=65 TO 10550 LPRINT CHR$(X);60 NEXT X: LPRINT: LPRINT

Now run the program. You should get the results you see below, 10 pica characters per inch.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _ ' a b c d e f g h i

Changing Widths

Now you can try other widths. As explained in Chapter 4, the FX-286uses the same pattern of dots for pica, elite, and condensed characters, but it changes the horizontal spaces between the dots to produce the three different widths.

In elite mode there are 12 characters per inch, and in condensed there are 17.16. The FX-286prints in elite when it receives the ESCape ‘WI” command (Escape ":" in Proprinter mode) and prints in condensed when it receives the ASCII 15 command. Print a sample line of elite characters by adding the following line to your previous pro- gram. (Simply type this line and press RETURN; you do not need to retype the other lines.)

20 LPRINT CHR$(27)"M";

or

20 LPRINT CHR$(27)":";

This line uses the command for elite, ESCape “M” (or “:“), to turn on that mode. When you run the program, your printout should look like the one below.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_'abcdefghi

5-3