Chapter 8

Forms Control

The FX has several features that make it easy for you to print on any size of page and to determine where on the page the printing will appear. Because they are needed most often for creating forms or for printing on pre-printed forms, these features are called forms control. With the FX you can easily change the length of a page, the margin settings, and the horizontal and vertical tabs. In this chapter and the next two, you will learn about these forms-control features.

This chapter covers the way you control form feeding, which is the movement of the paper from one paging unit to the next. You can control the distance the paper moves, the positioning of the print head at the top of each page, and the printer’s response to your use of single sheets of paper.

Form Length Control

The FX’s default form feed is 66 lines, which (in the default 12-dot line spacing) equals the length of a standard form: 11 inches. When you want to use a different size of paper, you can change the length of a form feed. The next three subsections cover these factors of form feeding.

Form feed distance

When the printer is not on line, using the FF button on the top of the printer feeds the paper to the top of the next form. If you want to advance the paper during a program run without stopping every- thing, pushing the FF button, then starting again, you can use an ASCII code that performs a form feed whenever you want one.

For the form feed command to be of any use, however, you must

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