Enhancing Your Printing

You can obtain a wide variety of printing effects with your printer, from changing the number of characters per inch to using special effects on selected words and phrases. This section gives you a sampling of the features you may select with your software.

For software control of these features, see the instructions for your application programs or look up their specific commands in the Command Summary in Chapter 9.

Character Spacing

To add greater variety to your documents, the printer has three cpi spacings, as well as proportional spacing. Each one can be selected with a software command.

For each of the built-in fonts, you can choose a character spacing of 10, 12, or 15 characters per inch, or proportional spacing. The printout below compares the three spacings:

T h i s i s 1 0 c p i p r i n t i n g .

This is 12 cpi printing .

This is 15 cpi printing.

As shown above, 15 cpi characters are only about two-thirds the height of 10 and 12 cpi characters. This makes 15 cpi particularly useful when you want to separate certain material from the main text.

In fixed cpi spacing each character is given the same amount of space. The width of proportional characters, however, varies from character to character. For example, a narrow letter like i takes less space than a wide letter like W. The width of each proportional character is given in the Appendix.

4-2 Software and Graphics