Filter
Top Products
95
character width is five dots (so you could not, for instance,
specify a starting column of 6 and an ending column of 8, even
though those are both within the acceptable range). If you in-
advertantly give an incorrect width value, however, your printer
is forgiving: it will automatically revert to the default width of
eleven dot columns.
Just as there was an easy trick for figuring the attribute byte
earlier, you still don’t need to know a thing about binary
arithmetic. Merely multiply the starting column by 16, add the
ending coulmn number, and add 128 if the character is not a
descender. If you prefer a formula: (descender * 128)+(start *
16)+ end.
One thing to remember about defining proportional
characters: a character cannot be wider than the specified
width. That seems obvious enough! For example, if you specify
a width of 6 for a character (starting in column 1 and ending in
column 6), the seventh through eleventh of dots (if you specified
any) will not print. You must, however, send information (even
if it is 0) for those columns when you defined a character; your
printer expects eleven characters following the (ESC)“&”
CHR$(O) nl n2 m0 sequence.
In most cases, the width you select should actually be one dot
wider than the number of columns that the character actually oc-
cupies. This is so that there will be a space (of one dot) between
3 characters when you print them. If you specify a width which is
exactly the same as the number of columns in the character
definition, the characters will touch when they print (this is
sometimes desirable - for border characters or for large
download characters that are more than eleven dots wide).
DEFINING NLQ DOWNLOAD CHARACTERS
In the previous sections, we have learned how to define and
print the draft download characters.
As you’ve learned in Chapter 3, you can print NLQ
characters. You can also define the download characters with
NLQ mode. Since NLQ characters use many more dots than
draft characters, defining NLQ download characters is more
complex than designing draft ones. If you use the grid and the
program in this section, however, you will be able to design your
own NLQ characters.