Star Micronics 8 Series manual Left-to-right printing, Moving horizontally from the left margin

Left-to-right printing

The EX-800normallyprintsbidirectionally,withtheprintpositionmoving alternatelyleft-to-rightand right-to-left.Cuttingdown printheadmotion does speedup printingfor thoseearlierstylesof printer—thoughit hardly compareswith laser printing.

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

Thefollowingcommanddoesnothingto improvethe accuracyof yourStar LaserPrinter8, but it’s included for software compatibility’ssake. The commandjust movestheprintpositiontotheleftmargin,actingasacarriage returnwithouta line feed. Normalprintingresumeswith the next carnage return.

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

<ESC><

Moving horizontally from the left margin

Two horizontalmotion commandssend the print positionto a particular positionon the line.Thesecommandsare basedon EX-800dots. Unfortu- natelyihe EX-800offers only 60 or 120dotsper inch,ratherthan the Star LaserPrinter8’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 rightfromthe currentprint position.

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

<ESC>$ nl n2

Atthebeginningof thechapterwesaidsomecommandvariables,likenl and n2 here, could representbytes to be addedtogether.This is one of those commands.The nl representsunits and n2 represents256-unitgroups.In this movecommand,the actualunits are the 1/60inch increments.

107