Lexmark 248X, 249X manual 248x Printers, Designing Draft and NLQ Characters, 105

Downloading

Characters and

Fonts

Section 7

This chapter explains how to download characters and provides programming examples for several escape sequences. The first part of the chapter is for 248x users; the second part is for 249x users.

The downloading feature lets you create custom fonts and special characters. You can create and print complete italic or foreign language character sets as well as symbols and special characters not in the printer character sets.

The examples in this chapter use the BASIC programming format shown on page 16.

248x Printers

Designing Draft and NLQ Characters

For Draft and NLQ (Near-Letter Quality) characters, the 9-wire printers use a character matrix that is 12-dots wide and 9-dots high. Ascenders generally use the top 7 rows, establishing row 7 as the baseline. Descender characters generally use the bottom 7 rows. For uniform and evenly spaced characters, each character should be 9-dots wide and start in column 1.

How Dots Are Added in NLQ Mode

The 9-wire printers can print downloaded draft characters in NLQ mode. Downloaded characters print at the same speed as standard characters. You design the characters for Draft and the printer adds the additional dots to each character when printing in NLQ mode.

Section 7: Downloading Characters and Fonts 105