The way Double-Strike gets this result is rather clever: the FX prints each character in the regular fashion until it reaches either the end of the line or the point at which you have Double-Strike turn off. Then the FX shifts the paper up slightly and prints the Double-Strike passage again. This means that every dot in each row of the character gets a shadow (see Figure 4-1). Double-Strike Mode fills in some of the more visible gaps between the dots of a character. The end result is better looking print.

Figure 4-1.Single-Strike and Double-Strike letters

Differences between Double-Strike and Single-Strike printing don’t stop with the quality of print. Since each passage prints twice, the throughput of the Double-Strike Mode is less than that of Single- Strike. It’s the old trade-off between speed and print quality. With a normal print speed of 160 characters per second (cps), the FX still moves along pretty quickly in the Double-Strike Mode.

Emphasized Mode

There is yet another way you can increase the boldness of your printed characters. ESCape “E” produces what we call Emphasized print. As in Double-Strike, each character gets two sets of dots. In Emphasized, however, the print head does not make two passes and does not move down the page. Instead, it slows down so that it can print overlapping dots, and prints each dot twice, the second time slightly to the right of the first, as illustrated in Figure 4-2.

To see Emphasized, add these lines to your program:30 LPRINT CHR$(27)"EEMPHASIZED ADDS A TOUCH OF CLASS"60 LPRINT CHR$(27)"@"

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