User-defined Characters

Design grids

To design a character you use a grid that is 24 dots high - one dot for each nozzle on your printer’s print head. The width of the character matrix is dependent upon the character set in use. For draft characters, the grid is nine dots wide. For Letter Quality it is 29 dots wide, and for proportional characters it is 37 dots wide maximum, with the dots fot both Letter Quality and proportional spaced more closely together than those for draft.

The illustration below shows two grids for designing normal height draft characters and proportional characters. The line at the side labelled cap height indicates the top of a standard capital letter, and the line labelled baseline indicates the baseline for all letters except those with descenders (the bottom parts of such letters as j and y). The bottom row is usually left blank because it is used for underlining.

 

Draft pica

 

 

Letter quality / Proportional

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The grid on the right side can be used for either Letter Quality or proportional characters. For Letter Quality you do not use all the columns.

4-22 Software and Graphics