Creating Your Own Characters

91

Hi ssi ssippi

Standard characters without proportional spacing

Mississippi

Download characters without proportional spacing

Download characters with proportional spacing

Figure 7-15.This printout shows the same text, printed with the same download

characters, in both normal and proportional widths.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table

7-2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Download

 

character

 

printing

 

commands

 

 

 

Function

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Control

code

 

 

 

Normal

download

characters

ON

 

 

(ESC)

“$” CHR$(l)

 

 

Normal

download

characters

OFF

 

 

(ESC)

‘I$” CHR$(o)

 

 

Proportional

download

characters

 

ON

 

(ESC)

“X”

CHR$(l)

 

 

Proportional

download

characters

 

OFF

 

(ESC)

“X”

CHR$(o)

 

 

Connecting

characters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As

we

noted

earlier,

it’s

possible

to

connect

proportional

width

characters.

This

can

be

useful for

creating

logos

or

other

characters

which

are

larger

than

one

normal

character.

It

also

makes

it possible

to

create

 

connecting

scripts,

like

handwriting.

The trick to this is to specify the width in the attribute byte to be exactly the same as the number of columns of dots that the charac- ter (or partial character) occupies. And, if you change the vertical

spacing to 7/72" (use the (ESC) “1” command), you can make

characters connect vertically. This allows you to make very large

characters indeed!

In the program that follows, we’ve used this technique to cre-

ate some large numbers. Each digit is actually made up of four

characters-two horizontally by two vertically. This means, of

course, that you must define and print four characters for each finished digit. We assigned the upper left quadrant of each digit to ASCII codes from 160 to 169, the upper right quadrant to codes 170 to 179, and so on. Figure 7-16shows how one digit is defined, and Figure 7-17 shows the final output of our program.

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Star Micronics Delta user manual Creating Your Own Characters