Filter
Top Products
Control Codes
Page 94 100-88002 Rev B
Character Sets and Code Pages
The Epic 880
TM
Printer is primarily intended to be used in Unicode based systems.
However to provide legacy support, the printer supports 8 bit and double byte ASCII
encoding with code pages.
When not using Unicode or double byte encoding, the printer is restricted to the 8 bit
ASCII character set. To support international languages, the characters that are
assigned to each of the 256 possible locations can be remapped to any character in
the Unicode standard. Typically, the first 32 characters are reserved for control
characters. The next 72 are typically fixed to alpha numeric and punctuation. The
upper 128 characters are typically redefined to characters that support the specific
language or country. These mappings are generally referred to as codepages.
The Epic 880
TM
provides several legacy commands to select a country code or
codepage maps. However, they all simply select an ASCII to Unicode translation
map. Several predefined mappings to provide legacy support are internal to the
printer, but the majority of the maps are placed in the printer’s file system. This allows
any preexisting codepage mapping to be defined as well as the ability to define
custom mappings unique to your application.
Codepage description files
The format of the codepage description file is somewhat flexible. The basic format is
that each line will specify an ASCII character ID and the Unicode character that is to
appear in that ASCII ID location.
The file format is one character per line with the first value being the ASCII ID and the
second value being the Unicode address. The file should be something like this:
0x00 0x0000 # NULL
0x01 0x0001 # START OF HEADING
0x02 0x0002 # START OF TEXT
0x03 0x0003 # END OF TEXT
...
or
\Language = USA
\Code Page = 437
0x00 0x0000 ; 0 NULL
0x01 0x263A ; 9786 WHITE SMILE
0x02 0x263B ; 9787 BLACK SMILE
0x03 0x2665 ; 9829 BLACK HEART SUIT
0x04 0x2666 ; 9830 BLACK DIAMOND SUIT
0x05 0x2663 ; 9827 BLACK CLUB SUIT
...
or
0 0 ; NULL
1 9786 ; WHITE SMILE
2 9787 ; BLACK SMILE
3 9829 ; BLACK HEART SUIT
4 9830 ; BLACK DIAMOND SUIT
5 9827 ; BLACK CLUB SUIT