In many cases, you will want to redefine only a few of the characters to suit your needs; the rest of the alphabet will work fine as it is. As you have seen, it is possible to switch back and forth at will between the normal character set and the user-defined character set. It is, however, rather inconvenient.

Therefore, the LQ has a command which allows you to copy all of the standard characters from ROM to the user-defined character set. The command format is:

ESC:OnO

If the variable n = 0, Roman is selected. If n = 1, Sans Serif is selected.

This command will cancel any user-defined characters you have created. You must send this command to the printer before you define characters.

If you use this command at the beginning of a program, then

define your special characters and select the user-defined. character set, you can print with the user-defined set as your normal character set. You’ll never need to switch back and forth between sets.

Letter Quality characters

If you select Letter Quality printing with the ESC xl command, you can design user-defined characters using up to 29 columns of the Letter Quality/Proportional grid. The dot columns are spaced closer together horizontally than draft style dot columns (the horizontal dot spacing is 1/360th of an inch as opposed to 1/120th of an inch for draft characters).

Proportional mode characters

Selecting the proportional character mode will yield user-defined characters of the highest resolution. Characters can be designed using all 37 columns of the Letter Quality/Proportional grid.

Remember that in Letter Quality and proportional, as in draft, you cannot place dots in adjacent columns. There must be an empty dot position to the left and right of each dot that prints.

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