Design grids

Printing user-defined characters is like printing graphics patterns

becuase you send the printer precise instructions on where you want each dot printed. In fact, planning a userdefined character is like planning a small graphics pattern.

To design a character you use a grid that 24 dots high-one dot for each wire on the LQ2500 print head. The width of the character matrix depends on the character set in use. For draft characters, the grid is nine dots wide.

For Letter Quality it is 29 dots wide, and for proportional characters it is 37 dots wide. The dots for both Letter Quality and proportional are spaced more closely together than those for draft.

Figure 65 shows the two design grids. The line at the side labelled cap indicates the top of a standard capital letter, and the line labelled base indicates the baseline for all letters except those with descenders (the bottom parts of such letters as j and y). The bottom row is usually left blank because it is used for underlining.

Figure 6-5.

Design grids

6-12

Gaphics and User-defined Characters