Notice that ESCape “T” turns either kind of Script Mode off and also that both versions of Script Mode are automatically printed in Double-Strike. Since Double-Strike prints at half speed, so do the Script Modes. And since Double-Strike can’t mix with Proportional, neither can either type of Script.

If you are using the FX-100 and you switch in and out of Double- Strike Mode several times in the same line, you will see that the print line slopes slightly to the right. This happens because Script prints in Double-Strike, for which FX printers use two passes. After one pass to print the characters on the current print line, the print head moves down the page one-third of a dot to print the second set of dots.

The FX-80 can use reverse feed to return to the original print line, but the FX-100 cannot. This does not make much difference when you use Double-Strike infrequently. If you are using an FX-100, you can add Underline Mode to your program to see exactly where the jog comes:

10 LPRINT CHR$(27)"-1"

We mention this now because it is with Script characters that you are most likely to move in and out of Double-Strike several times on one line. If you do that on an FX-100, you’ll get a line that declines.

If Double-Strike was the current mode before the printer entered Script Mode, the printer exits from Script to Double-Strike. If not, the printer returns to Single-Strike.

Italic Mode

This is the last print mode that we introduce in this chapter. Italic characters are printed in a completely different typeface than are the more usual Roman characters. Appendix A shows the dot-matrix patterns used to define both Roman and Italic characters, along with their corresponding ASCII numbers. As you saw in Chapter 2, the Italic characters’ numbering begins in the top half of the ASCII range (at 160, to be exact). And some computer systems won’t let the numbers of the top half through to the printer.

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