The 17 backspaces (line 40) are printed in Compressed Mode. The difference in character widths makes the second printing of the word BACKSPACES be offset from the first.

In the next program, the offset is a little more dramatic. Change the following lines:

30 LPRINT "BACKSPACE"CHR$(15);

40 FOR X=1 TO 15: LPRINT CHR$(8);: NEXT X 50 LPRINT CHR$(18)"BACKSPACE"

After the FX prints each BACKSPACE, it moves the print head 15 Compressed positions backward. Instead of bold characters, you get a shadow effect. You could spend all day mixing pitch modes to get different eye-stretching effects.

Unidirectional Mode

The FX printers provide high quality printouts in their normal bidirectional print mode. However, there may be situations in which vertical columns printed in Elite or Compressed Mode get slightly mis- aligned. The printer has a Unidirectional Mode to prevent such problems .

To see how effective Unidirectional Mode can be, let’s create a long vertical line. First we’ll print it in the usual, bidirectional manner. Begin by typing:

20 LPRINT CHR$(27)"1"CHR$(27)"1"CHR$(40)

40 FOR X=1 TO 10: LPRINT CHR$(124): NEXT X 50 LPRINT CHR$(27)"@"

Line 20 sets the line spacing to seven dots and the left margin to 40. To create the vertical line, line 40 prints one character (represented by ASCII 124) 10 times (on 10 print lines). Line 50 resets the printer to its defaults.

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