Star Micronics NX-10 user manual Ascii

27

line feed	-the	name	of the code
UJ’)	-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. Our computers are smart enough to know that when we press the “A” key we want to print the letter “A” - they take 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.

nThe escape codes

Back when the ASCII system was set up, computer equip- ment 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 needed so they included the escape (ESC) code to allow almost any number of additional codes to be defined when they became necessary.

ESC allows us to “escape” from the ordinary set of control codes so we can specify additional functions and other informa- tion needed for a printer function. In this manual, we’ll write the ESC code inside broken brackets, like this - (ESC).

(ESC) - ,decimal 27 - is always followed by at least one other number; it is never used alone. The whole series of related numbers is called an escape sequence.

W A note on command syntax

Because the readers of this manual will be running such a wide variety of applications on so many different computers, we just can’t show the exact way of sending codes to the printer for each one of them. Instead, as we introduce you to each new com- mand, we will show the commands as in this example:

(ESC) “W” 1