Star Micronics SJ-48 manual Defining Your OWN 24-DOT Characters

Chapter 7

DC

With this printer you can create new characters and symbols, download their dot data, and have them printed in place of selected characters in the regular character set. Characters that can be generated in this way range from simple but useful symbols like the check mark through to complex Chinese or Japanese characters.

Regular characters are permanently stored in the printer’s ROM, but characters you design are downloaded and stored in RAM for use.

Before you start to define your own characters, you must set the DIP switch 2 to OFF. Otherwise, the RAM is used to store the input buffer, and the download commands are ignored.

DEFINING YOUR OWN 24-DOT CHARACTERS

Designing and printing your own characters has two requirements: first, designing the shape of the character, calculating the data necessary to make the shape, and sending that data to the printer, and secondly, sending the command to print the downloaded characters instead of the regular characters. There are a number of design constraints for download characters:

. The matrix or grid on which you design the characters depends upon the print mode as shown below:

Character mode	Horizontal	Vertical
Pica characters	31	24
Elite characters	27	24
Semi-condensed	19	16
Proportional	37	24
Super/subscript	19	16
Proportional super/subscript	37	16

. The minimum width of ,acharacter is ilve dots.

. Dots cannot overlap.

. You may define any position in the ASCII table upto 127 characters.

Photocopy the grid in Figure 7-1 to help design your new characters. We will use a tiny representation of a telephone symbol for our example.

Chapter7 DOWNLOAD CHARACTERS 67