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TRANSPARENCY MODES
General Information
Most ASCII and EBCDIC printers have features that are not available on
IBM printers. If the users host application is aware that the destination of
the data may be a non-IBM printer attached to a protocol converter, the
application can take advantage of the printers advanced features. To
activate a particular printer feature, the application will send a transparent
command in the data stream. (Refer to the printer users manual for a list of
available printer commands.)
A transparent printer command, or transparency, consists of a trigger
(character code) followed by the hexadecimal command that will activate a
particular printer feature. The trigger alerts the protocol converter that the
data that follows it is a printer command that should be sent directly to the
printer without translation.
If the appropriate form of transparency is activated, the ULTRA will
recognize the trigger and respond appropriately to that form of
transparency. The ULTRA can use standard IBM 35h, Xerox 36h and
Xerox Metacode transparency. The ULTRA provides its own version of
transparency, called pseudo transparency mode (PTM). It also is capable of
supporting MD-Laser and AGILE Laserpage pseudo transparency.
Note: If the user or the users application embeds transparent or pseudo
transparent strings in the data stream, Option #1 Column Width should
be set to 0 (infinite line length), Option #2 Lines Per Page should be set
to 0 (infinite page length), and Option #15 Bold Print Emulation should
be set to C (none). Otherwise, unpredictable formatting errors may occur.
For more information, refer to Section 12 DisplayWrite 370 Support.
IBM 35 Hex Transparency Mode
This form of transparency is valid only in SCS data streams. In IBM 35h
transparency, the trigger character is 35h, and it indicates the start of the
transparent data stream. The 35h is followed by a count byte that indicates
the length, in bytes, of the transparent data stream, not counting the count
byte itself. The count byte is followed by the actual data to be sent. For
instance, the following code will send a Xerox 4045 printer reset command
(Esc+X) using 35h transparency:
35031B2B58
SECTION 11