Chapter 4

PIC Features

The next four chapters describe many of the printing features of the PIC. You can read these chapters if you wish, but you may not need to. Whether or not you use the rest of this manual depends upon your expertise, your interest, and the software you plan to use.

Demonstration Programs

Along with a discussion and examples of the PIC features, these chapters include demonstrations in the BASIC programming language so that you can see these features in action. Although you will probably not do much of your printing using BASIC, the demonstrations are in BASIC because it comes with most computers.

You don’t need to know anything about BASIC to type in and run these programs. All the instructions you need are on the next page.

As you run the programs (or even as you read the explanations and look at the printed examples), you learn how the LX-90 responds to the messages your computer sends it by printing letters, numbers, symbols, and graphics in various print modes.

Even if you never use BASIC again, you will know the capabilities of your printer, capabilities that can often solve your printing prob- lems. For example, if you need a special symbol, such as a Greek let- ter, you will know that you can turn to the chapter on user-defined characters and create such a character.

If you don’t want to do the exercises in BASIC, you don’t have to. In most cases the software that you use for word processing, business, or graphics does the calculating and communicating with the

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