Star Micronics ND-10/15 user manual 105

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dots wide by 9 dots high. Vertically, dots can only be centered in a box. See Figure 7-2.

•The minimum width of a character is five dots.

•Unlike standard characters that are restricted to a height of seven dots, user-defined characters may use eight dots vertically.

•Dots cannot overlap - that is, you may not have a dot inside a box next to one that is on a line.

•You may define any position in the ASCII table, except the block graphics area when you are downloading in the IBM modes.

	__.	.	J
Figure 7-2.			. . . .
	Dots can be inside boxes or straddle	the	vertical lines of
the grid.

Photocopy the grid in Figure 7-3 to help design your new characters. We will use a tiny representation of a chemist’s flask for our example. We decided that our flask will not be a “descender” (printing below the baseline of standard charac- ters), so a figure “1” is written next to Descender on the grid. If your character is a descender, write a “0” next to Descender.

Next we calculate the vertical numerical values of the columns of dots, and enter them underneath the grid. For example. looking at Figure 7-4, we see that in the left-most column there is only one dot, and it is sitting in the “2” box. Thus its vertical value is 2. In the next column, there is a dot straddling the vertical line in the “1” box, and another in the “4” box; its value is recorded as 5.