Star Micronics SB-15 Erasing Download Character Definitions, Defining Proportional Characters

ERASING DOWNLOAD CHARACTER DEFINITIONS

After you have defined a set of characters (a whole new al- phabet, perhaps) you may want to go back to using mostly standard characters with a few new user-defined characters mixed in. Rather than turning SD-lo/l 5 off (which erases all of the current settings, including download characters), you can send

a command which will restore the default characters. This command copies all the characters from the standard character ROM into download RAM:

(For STAR mode)

<ESC> “9;” 0

(For IBM mode)

<ESC> ‘I:”0 0 0

Since it will copy all characters into the download area, it will wipe out any characters that are already there. So it’s important to send this command to the printer before you send any download characters you want to define.

DEFINING PROPORTIONAL CHARACTERS

Except for the actual width, defining characters for propor- tional printing is exactly the same as defining normal width download characters. Characters can range from 5 to 11 dots wide. This means that characters can be as narrow as one-half

the normal width.

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Besides being able to specify the actual width of the character,

SD-lo/l5 allows you to specify the position in the standard grid _ - where the character will print. You must specify the dot column

in which the printed character starts and the dot column in which the character ends. Why, you may ask, would you want to defme a character this way instead of merely defining the overall width

of the character? Because SD- 1O/15’s proportional character definitions can also be used to print normal width characters, which are eleven dot columns wide. And by centering even the narrow characters in the complete grid (look at the “i” in Figure

9-12) they will look good even when you aren’t printing them proportionally.

The command format for proportional character definition is exactly the same as you have learned; the only difference is the

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