Star Micronics NB-15 user manual Eighth bit controls

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power on condition.

You can also set the printer to print in one direction for one line only by using the (ESC) “(” command. This command im- mediately moves the printhead to the left margin and then prints the remainder of the line from left to right.

H The seven bit dilemma

Certain computers (but not the IBM-PC fortunately!) don’t have the capability to send eight bits on their parallel interface. They can only send seven bits. This would make it impossible

for these computers to use this printer’s block graphics characters and special symbols if our engineers hadn’t thought of a solution. (All of these characters have ASCII codes greater than 127 which means that the eighth bit must be on to use them.) The solution lies in the three control codes given in the following table:

Table 7-4

Eighth bit controls

H Block graphics characters and special symbols

Besides the upper and lower case letters and symbols that we are by now familiar with, your printer has a whole different set of characters that are for special uses. These characters include block graphics for drawing forms and graphs, and special sym- bols for mathematical, engineering and professional uses. The special characters are included in two character sets. The character set you normally use is called character set #l. The special characters are printed out when you send ASCII codes 160-255 to the printer.

Your printer also offers character set #2 which is almost the same as character set #1 except for the addition of ASCII codes 3-6,21, and 128-159. Character set #2 is selected with (ESC) “6”; to go back to character set #1, use (ESC)“7”.

You can also specify the power-on default character set by set- ting DIP switch l-5 on for character set #1 and off for character set #2 while the DIP switch 2-2 is set on. The following program will print out all of the graphics characters available: