Chapter 6

Print Enhancements and Special Characters

Now that you have seen how you can change the pitch of your LX-80 printing, we can show you many more ways to vary and enhance your printing. So that you won’t have to type in dozens of programs to try all the features, we give you just one master program that can demonstrate any feature.

Bold Modes

Besides the pitches (pica, elite, and compressed) that we covered in Chapter 5, the LX-80 offers many other typestyles, including two for bold printing-emphasized and double-strike.

Emphasized mode

In the emphasized mode the LX-80 prints each dot twice, with the second dot slightly to the right of the first. In order to do this, the print head must slow down so that it has time to fire, retract, and fire the pins quickly enough to produce the overlapping dots. As you can see in Figure 6-1, this method produces better-looking, more fully- formed characters that are darker than single-strike ones.

Figure 6-1. Emphasized and single-strike

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