IBM 4400 manual Series XQ Printer Protocol

3 P-Series XQ Printer

Protocol

Introduction

This chapter describes the P-Series XQ emulation host control codes. “Emulation” refers to the ability of a printer to execute the commands of a particular printer control language. A printer control language is the coding system used to convey, manipulate, and print data. Carriage Return, print quality, character attributes such as bold and underline, margins, and tabs are typical functions selected by printer control language codes. In this manual, the terms emulation, printer protocol, and printer control language are synonymous.

The P-Series XQ emulation was devised for a series of Printronix printers manufactured between 1974 and 1991, but no longer available. This emulation enables your printer to emulate Printronix P300 and P600 printers with A7/B10 boards. To select the P-Series XQ emulation mode as the active printer emulation, select ASCII Emulation from the EMULATION menu and P-Series XQ from the Printer Protocol menu, as described in the User's Guide.

The P-Series XQ emulation provides many configurable parameters. The default parameter values for this emulation are shown in Table 12. You can modify the emulation parameter values in two ways:

•The P-Series XQ host control codes. An extensive set of P-Series XQ control code commands can be sent to the printer from an attached host computer via the host data stream. Most of this chapter is devoted to describing the P-Series XQ control codes.

•The printer configuration menus. You can modify a subset of the P- Series XQ emulation parameters using the control panel keys and LCD, as described in the User’s Guide.

Control codes sent from a host system generally override previous settings that result from the configuration menus.

NOTE: Configuration values selected from the menus or via host control codes can be saved to the printer's NVRAM memory so that they will not be lost when you power off the printer. The menu selection for saving a configuration to memory is described in the User’s Guide. To save the configuration using host control codes, refer to Appendix B, “PTR_SETUP Option”.

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