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The Last Word 3.0 Reference Manual
6-35
6 CONFIGURING LW FOR YOUR PRINTER
You can customize LW's print styling commands to suit any kind of printer. Toggles
can be set up for italics, bold, underlining, superscript and subscript, and up to 10
further styling commands can be defined for any purpose you can think of.
6.1 PRINTER DRIVERS
LW uses printer driver files (with the extension "PDR") to configure itself for various
printers. At run-time, LW will attempt to load LW.PDR, so you can have the settings in
this file available every time you run the program. If LW.PDR can't be found, LW uses
its own default printer driver, which supports no special formatting and will send
documents to the printer completely "clean". You can load printer drivers at any time
during an editing session with:
<SHIFT+CTRL+D> Load printer driver. Just type a filename as usual - ".PDR" will be
appended if you supply no extender.
Printer driver files translate the styling commands for italics, underline, boldface, etc.,
as well as international characters, into codes specific to your printer.
6.2 CREATING A PRINTER DRIVER
Although previous versions of LW used the LWPD.COM printer driver editor, that
program is no longer necessary when editing LW 3.0 printer drivers, which are now
stored as plain text files. Several printer drivers are supplied with the program, but it’s
easy to write your own if you know the escape codes for your printer.
Printer driver commands must be placed one per line in the printer driver file and
terminated with <Return>. The following statements are available:
Statement
Arguments
Comments
UNDERLINE ON¦OFF
n,n,n...
Underline on and off
ITALIC ON¦OFF
n,n,n...
Italics on and off
BOLD ON¦OFF
n,n,n...
Bold on and off
SUPERSCRIPT ON¦OFF
n,n,n...
Superscript on and off
SUBSCRIPT ON¦OFF
n,n,n...
Subscript on and off
INTERNATIONAL ON¦OFF
n,n,n...
International character set on and off
CRLF
n,n,n...
Carriage return/linefeed codes
INIT
n,n,n...
Printer initialisation codes
CODE
char,n
Assign international character code
STYLE
<1 - 10>,n,n,n...
Assign styles 1 - 10
Let's step through creating a printer driver for an EPSON compatible STAR LC-10
printer (not that you need to, since an EPSON driver is supplied, but it will do as an
example).