Epson FX DELete and CANcel, Alternate Formats for ESCape Sequences, ITALIC CHARACTER SET, BACK 'TO ROMAN WITH ITALIC OFF

ITALIC CHARACTER SETBACK 'TO ROMAN WITH ITALIC OFF

Notice that CHR$(53) turned Italic off and the semicolon at the end of line 30 eliminated the blank line between the two lines of text.

DELete and CANcel

But suppose you don’t want that much power. Suppose you only want to erase text in the print buffer without affecting any print modes. Two codes do this: DELete and CANcel. DELete, which is CHR$(127), removes the latest text character from the buffer without affecting control codes. CANcel, which is CHR$(24), is a slightly more powerful code. It removes all the text currently in the buffer, but it also does not affect the control codes.

These codes are seldom used, but they can be helpful if your system sends unwanted characters at the beginning of a program listing or a program run. You can then use one or more DELete or CANcel codes at the start of your program to clear out these characters.

Alternate Formats for ESCape Sequences

Activating each of the many FX features with a sequence that consists of the ESCape code plus another character-string command can be cumbersome to use and difficult to remember. Fortunately, there are techniques for shortening the format.

The simplest method is to shorten the character-string command that follows the ESCape code. Instead of using CHR$ and a number in parentheses, you can use-inside quotation marks-the ASCII character that corresponds to the number. For example, you have already seen that you can send the Reset Code with CHR$(27)CHR$(64). Because the @ symbol is the ASCII equivalent of 64, this command can also be typed in as CHR$(27) ” @ ” .

We use this shorter format whenever possible. To see it in your current program, change lines 10 and 30. The ASCII symbol for the 52

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