Star Micronics NR-10, NR-15 user manual Ascii

Your printer has a lot of control codes to let you do some useful things. Let’s try one that we’ve mentioned several times already:

10' Demo of ASCII code

20LPRINT CHR$(7)

30END RUN

That’s the printer’s bell (we call it that even though it sounds like a buzzer). We’ll learn more about it later - we just wanted to show you a control code that would get your attention right away!

There are four common ways of referring to a control code: the name of the code or its abbreviation, the decimal ASCII value, the hexadecimal ASCII value, and the “CTRL-” value. For example, the ASCII code that causes the printer to advance the paper one line is decimal 10. This code may be referred to by any of the following:

line feed	-	the name		of the code
<LF>	-	its	abbreviation
ASCII 10	-	its	decimal	value

ASCII &HOA - its hexadecimal value (the &H signifies hex)

CHR$(lO) - the way it’s used in BASIC

CTRL-J - the way you send it from a keyboard

Of course, most of the time we don’t need to bother with these. The computer is smart enough to know that when we press the “A” key we want to print the letter “A” - it takes care of all the intermediate steps.

Appendix B is a table that shows the various names for each code so you can convert back ,and forth. The microcomputer world is not very consistent in describing ASCII codes, so it’s important that you have a basic knowledge of them.

H The escape codes

Back when the ASCII system was set up, computer equipment was relatively simple and thirty-three control codes were considered sufficient at the time. The American Standards people realized that eventually more control codes would be