The code to turn italic mode on is ESCape “4”. Try it in the master program if you wish. When you use this code in the master program, enter “4” in answer to the first question just as if it were a letter of the alphabet instead of a number. ESCape “5” turns off italic mode.

Those of you who use this code in an applications program should remember that any character in quotation marks in our discussions of ESCape codes is an alphanumeric character, not a numerical value.

Underline Mode

The LX-80 also has a mode that will underline characters and spaces. You turn it on with ESCape “-1” and off with ESCape “-0”. Note that the underline code is like the expanded code in that it uses a character, in this case the hyphen or minus sign, combined with numeral one to turn it on and a character combined with the numeral zero to turn it off. As you can see in Figure 6-5, this mode prints a dot in the bottom row of each column, thus producing a continuous underline.

46