Lexmark 248X Designing Fast Draft Characters Designing NLQ II Characters, Downloading Characters

When a diagonal line intersects a vertical line at a point other than the end of the vertical line, you should specify a horizontal dot at the intersection to improve character appearance. This ensures that the character is acceptable in Draft.

Designing Fast Draft Characters

The character matrix for Fast Draft characters is 10-dots wide and 9-dots high. Ascender characters generally use the top 7 rows, establishing row 7 as the baseline. Descender characters use the bottom 7 rows. Fast Draft characters must be no wider than 9 dots, or they will be truncated when printed. Fast Draft characters cannot be printed in NLQ mode.

Designing NLQ II Characters

NLQ II characters are designed on a character matrix 24-dots wide and 18-dots high. Ascenders generally use the top 15 rows, establishing row 15 as the baseline.

Descenders use the bottom 16 rows (rows 3 through 18). The maximum character width is 23 dots. The maximum height of a character is 16 dots, beginning with row 1 (for ascenders) or row 3 (for descenders). If you design a character that is higher than 16 dots, it will be truncated when printed.

Consecutive horizontal dots are eliminated (except in emphasized mode) when characters are printed. To ensure a character looks the same when printed left to right or right to left, the number of consecutive dots in a character design should be odd.

To design characters that will blend with the resident characters, use rows 2 through 15 when designing a capital letter. If you are designing a lowercase letter such as ’a’, ’c’, or ’e’, use rows 6 through 15. For lowercase ascenders such as ’b’, ’d’, or ’f’, use rows 1 through 15. For lowercase descenders such as ’g’, ’p’, or ’q’, use rows 6 through 18.

Downloading Characters

The 9-wire printers have 3 download areas. The first download area is for a draft character set and can store 256 characters in any area of the character set. The draft download area can also be used to store a downloaded Fast Draft character. The other two download areas are for NLQ II+. Any type of character can be downloaded using the ESC = command and selected for printing with the ESC I command.

If you use the operator panel to select a code page from Character Options the draft download area is initialized to code page 437. The two NLQ II download areas are also unitized to code page 437 Courier and italic fonts.

Section 7: Downloading Characters and Fonts 109