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Control codes mostly handle communications between your computer and
the printer at the lowest level, at cable level. For example, a couple of control
codes make sure the printer buffer (your printer’s storage memory) doesn’t
overflow. In this book we’ll indicate control codes enclosed by angle
brackets to their abbreviations in the table: <FF> means the Form Feed
control code, which advances the printer to the next page just as the PRINT
button does.
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Escapesequences
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Control code 27, <ES0 or Escape, is a particularly important one for
printers. To tell your printer all the things you might need- setting margins,
saying where to print, choosing a particular font, starting graphics and so
on- requires many more than just two or three dozen control codes. So the
<ES0 control code has a special meaning: <ES0 means “the next
character specifies a command, not something to be printed”.
Therefore if you send just the character 4 to the printer it will print a 4 and
that’s all. But if you send the <ES0 code just before the 4 then the printer
(in EX-800 mode) will switch over to italics text. Extending the control
codes this way gives you many more commands to control your printer. In
fact, these “Escape sequences” make up most of the Star Laser Printer’s
language.
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In this book we’ll leave spaces between characters when we show escape
sequences. You’ll find
a bit more readable than
<ESC> (sOplOh12vOs3T
But remember that you are not to send those spaces if you send commands
to the printer.
To sum up, printer commands are of two types. A control code is a single-
character command that tells your printer to do something, like move down
one line. An Escape sequence controls a printer operation too, but is more
than one character long. Since they am commands, neither control codes nor
escape sequences am usually printable characters.
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