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Section 7: Downloading Characters and Fonts
When a diagonal line intersects a vertical line at a point other than the end of the
vertical line, you should specify a horizontal dot at the intersection to improve
character appearance. This ensures that the character is acceptable in Draft.
Designing Fast Draft Characters
The character matrix for Fast Draft characters is 10-dots wide and 9-dots high.
Ascender characters generally use the top 7 rows, establishing row 7 as the
baseline. Descender characters use the bottom 7 rows. Fast Draft characters
must be no wider than 9 dots, or they will be truncated when printed. Fast Draft
characters cannot be printed in NLQ mode.
Designing NLQ II Characters
NLQ II characters are designed on a character matrix 24-dots wide and 18-dots
high. Ascenders generally use the top 15 rows, establishing row 15 as the
baseline.
Descenders use the bottom 16 rows (rows 3 through 18). The maximum
character width is 23 dots. The maximum height of a character is 16 dots,
beginning with row 1 (for ascenders) or row 3 (for descenders). If you design a
character that is higher than 16 dots, it will be truncated when printed.
Consecutive horizontal dots are eliminated (except in emphasized mode) when
characters are printed. To ensure a character looks the same when printed left to
right or right to left, the number of consecutive dots in a character design should
be odd.
To design characters that will blend with the resident characters, use rows 2
through 15 when designing a capital letter. If you are designing a lowercase
letter such as ’a’, ’c’, or ’e’, use rows 6 through 15. For lowercase ascenders such
as ’b’, ’d’, or ’f’, use rows 1 through 15. For lowercase descenders such as ’g’, ’p’,
or ’q’, use rows 6 through 18.
Downloading Characters
The 9-wire printers have 3 download areas. The first download area is for a
draft character set and can store 256 characters in any area of the character set.
The draft download area can also be used to store a downloaded Fast Draft
character. The other two download areas are for NLQ II+. Any type of character
can be downloaded using the ESC = command and selected for printing with
the ESC I command.
If you use the operator panel to select a code page from Character Options the
draft download area is initialized to code page 437. The two NLQ II download
areas are also unitized to code page 437 Courier and italic fonts.