Pertech 5300 manual Use of The Driver from within Applications

Commands can be entered in ASCII text or Hexadecimal format. To enter in hex, bracket the hex code with <> symbols. If spaces are added between characters, the printer driver will automatically convert them to <20>, or 20h, which is equivalent to ASCII space character, when OK or Apply is clicked.

Note that some commands will affect page length and may make the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) system no longer an accurate representation of the printed page.

Start of Document

This command will be sent at the start of each print job, after the printer driver transmits its own print job setup commands to the printer.

Start of Page

This command will be sent at the start of each page break in a document.

End of Page

This command will be sent at the end of each page break in a document.

End of Document

This command will be sent at the end of each print job.

Use of The Driver from within Applications

Margins:

Most word processor packages tend to automatically set all margins to approximately 1 inch (25 mm). With a printer whose field width is less than 3 inches, this will obviously need to be changed. A good starting point is to set all margins to zero. This will usually ensure that the left and right margins are set to the minimum (You may need to specify the Fix utility in Word to do this).

It is recommended that the top and bottom margins are also set to zero. Note that there is an inherent top margin associated with the 53xx series printers which corresponds to the distance between the print head and the tear bar in Journal and Continuous modes. Bottom margins should use the Bill Out feature of the driver.

Resident Printer Fonts:

Any of the fonts available to applications can be used by the printer (See below about the Control Font). It should be noted however that resident printer fonts (signified by a small printer icon in the font list) print much faster and with slightly better resolution than True Type fonts (signified by the small TT icon). The style of printer fonts as compared with the enormous range of available True Type fonts is tiny. The choice of when to use each type will depend very largely on the application. Note that

while it is possible to print TT fonts and generic printer fonts on the same line, this should be avioded if pos- sible. Printing TT and generic printer fonts on the same line will slow down the print speed, as the print head has to sweep twice, and it will increase the print job time.

Note that there are two point sizes for each font: 9 and

18.Most applications require that these be specifically set to either 9 or 18. If not, then the application will se- lect a true type font instead. These resident fonts are:

Wide 8 CPI	Wide 10 CPI
Normal 10 CPI	Normal 12.3 CPI
Normal 14.5 CPI	Normal 16 CPI
Normal 20 CPI

Bold, Italic and Underline versions are all available. In- verse printing causes these fonts to be printed all black.

Control Font:

The Control Font is the means by which the printer’s extra features can be controlled. On a standard printer there is no such thing as a Cash Drawer controller so the Windows operating system was designed without a means of such control. The way around this problem is to use the Control Font that appears in the list as a generic printer font. These are the only characters that are used:

A - Fire cash drawer A	B - Fire cash drawer B
C - Clean Print Nozzles	1 - Select stored logo 1
2 - Select stored logo 2	3 - Select stored logo 3
4 - Select stored logo 4	5 - Select stored logo 5
6 - Select stored logo 6	7 - Select stored logo 7
8 - Select stored logo 8	9 - Select stored logo 9

Note that only the capital letters in this font do anything and while the characters appear on the screen the printer will not print them on the job, although they may slightly affect the page length. These characters should appear on a line by themselves, rather than embedded into other text.

If there was no logo downloaded to the printer that cor- responds to the digit, the printer will ignore the Control font digit and nothing will be printed.

Note that the driver does not have the ability to store logos, only print them.

Status:

The status information is not exported by the driver and is only used to generate the status display on the task bar. Note that the icon displayed on the task bar only displays the last change in status from the printer.

To view the current complete status report, click on the status icon and a small dialog box will appear.

Pertech Resources Inc. November 2005 220321A 15