Bidirectional Printing

In nearly all of our discussions in this manual, we describe the action of the LX-80 print head as moving from left to right, as a typewriter does. During its normal operation while printing in the draft mode, however, the LX-80 prints bidirectionally. That is, the print head goes from left to right only on every other line. On the other lines it reverses everything and prints right to left.

By reversing both the dot patterns and the printing direction, the LX-80 produces a line that is correct and looks no different from a line printed from left to right. It does this to save time. Otherwise, the time the print head takes to go from the right margin back to the left would be wasted.

The intelligence of the printer takes care of all the calculations necessary for this bidirectional printing, so you don’t have to be concerned about it. You simply do your part of the work as if the printer will be printing from left to right on each line and let the LX-80 do all the necessary calculations so that you can enjoy the increased speed.

Changing Pitches

In addition to pica, in which there are 10 characters per inch, the LX-80 can also print in other widths, or pitches. It does so by reducing the distance between pin firings. In the elite mode it prints 12 characters per inch and in the compressed mode it prints slightly more than 17 characters per inch. The pattern of the dots is not changed, but the horizontal space between them is reduced.

In Figure 3-2 are enlargements of four sample letters in each of the three pitches. These letters are chosen to show how the LX-80 prints letters that are uppercase and lowercase, wide and narrow, and with and without descenders (the bottom part of the y).

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