The information about the actual character design (which is contained in the data statements at the end of the program) is sent to the printer in the loop between lines 50 and 70.

Note

When defining Letter Quality or proportional characters, put a WIDTH statement in your program to prevent carriage return and line feed codes from interfering with your definitions.

Printing User-defined Characters

If you completed the example program above, you defined an arrow and placed it in the RAM location for ASCII code 64 (replacing the “at” sign). You can now print out a three-line sample of your work. The first and third lines (printed by lines 80 and 120 of the program) print the normal ‘at” sign: the second line (line 100) prints the arrow that you defined. Run the program to see the printout below:

ls@@@ro

@@@@@

As you can see, both sets of characters (the original ROM characters that the printer normally uses and the userdefined character set) remain in the printer available for your use. The command to switch between the two sets is used in lines 90 and 110. It is:

ESCape ‘%” n

If R is equal to 0, the normal ROM character set is selected (this is the default). If R is equal to 1, the user-defined character set is selected. If you select the user-defined character set before you have defined any characters, the command is ignored and the ROM characters are still used.

You may switch between character sets at any time-even in the middle of a line. To try it, place semicolons at the end of lines 80 and 100 in the program.

Graphics and User-defined Characters

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