Star Micronics 4 manual Left-to-rightprinting, Movinghorizontallyfrom the left margin

5.4.7 Left-to-rightprinting

The FX-850normallyprintsbidirectionally,withthe printpositionmoving alternatelyleft-to-rightand right-to-left.Cuttingdown printheadmotion does speedup printingfor thoseearlierstylesof printer—thoughit hardly compam with laser printing.

we problemwithbidirectionalprintingis thattheprintheadcan getslightly out of alignment. When you’re using more primitive took sometimes accuracymattersmorethan speed,so a commandfor plainold left-to-right printing (sometimescalled “unidirectionalprinting”)is availableon Ep- son’s printem.

The followingcommanddoesnothingto improvethe accuracyof yourStar LaserPrinter4, but it’s included for software compatibility’ssake. The commandjust movestheprintpositionto theleftmargin,actingasacarriage Mum withouta line feed. Normalprintingresumeswith the next carriage return.

To turn on left-to-rightprintingforjust one line, this is the command:

<ESC><

5.4.8 Movinghorizontallyfrom the left margin

Two horizontalmotion commandssend the print positionto a particular positionon the line. Thesecommandsare basedon FX-850dots. Unfortu- natelythe FX-850offers only 60 or 120dots per inch, ratherthan the Star LaserPrinter4’susualdensityof 300 dots. So we’llexpressthesemovesin terms of incrementsof 1/60or 1/120inch.

Onemovecommandis an“absolute”move,to therightfromtheleftmargin. The other is a “relative”move,left or right fromthe currentprintposition.

To move from the left margin in incrementsof 1/60 inch, you send this command:

<ESC>$ d n2

Atthebeginningofthechapterwesaidsomecommandvariables,likenl and n2 here, could representbytes to be added together.This is one of those commands.The nl representsunits and n2 represents256-unitgroups.In this move command,the actualunits are the 1/60inch increments.

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