Enhancing Your Printing

You can obtain a wide variety of printing effects with your printer, from changing the number of characters per inch to using special effects on selected words and phrases. This section gives you a sampling of the features you may select with your software.

For software control of these features, see the instructions for your application programs or look up their specific commands in the

Command Summary in Chapter 9.

Character Spacing

To add greater variety to your documents, your printer has three cpi spacings, as well as proportional spacing. Each one can be selected with a software command.

For each of the three built-in fonts, you can choose a character spacing of 10, 12, or 15 characters per inch, or proportional spacing. The printout below compares the three cpi spacings:

This is 10 cpi printing.

This is

12 cpi printing.

This is 15 cpi printing.

As shown above, 15 cpi characters are only about two-thirds the height of 10 and 12 cpi characters. This makes 15 cpi particularly useful when you want to separate certain material from the main text.

In fixed cpi spacing each character is given the same amount of space.

The width of proportional characters, however, varies from character to character. For example, a narrow letter like i takes less space than a wide letter like W. The width of each proportional character is given in the Appendix.

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The following printout compares

10 cpi spacing with proportional spacing:

This is 10 cpi printing.

This is proportional printing.

r

Note: Proportional spacing is not available in the draft mode.

I

Character Size

In addition to the basic cpi spacings and proportional spacing, your printer offers three other modes that can change the size of your printing. These modes are double-wide, double-high, and condensed.

The double-wide mode doubles the width of any size character, while the double-high mode doubles the height of any size character. These modes are useful for emphasizing document titles and headings in reports, but are usually not suitable for large amounts of text. These modes can also be combined to obtain even more impressive printing results.

T h i s i s n o r m a l 1 0 c p i p r i n t i n g .

T h i s i s d o u b l e - w i d e ,

This is double-high,

T h i s i s d o u b l e - w i d e a n d d o u b l e - h i g h .

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Both 10 and 12 cpi printing can be reduced to about 60 percent of their normal width using the condensed mode. This mode is particularly useful for printing wide spreadsheets because condensed 12 cpi printing allows you to print up to 272 characters on a 13.6-inch line.

The condensed mode can be selected with a software command, or by using SelecType (see Chapter 3). Even if you turn the condensed mode on with SelecType, you can still turn it off with a software command.

Condensed 10 cpi gives you many characters on a line,

Condensed

12 cpi gives you even lore characters on a line,

Widening or narrowing the characters also widens or narrows the spaces between words. Because word processors usually create a left margin by printing spaces, you may need to change the left margin and the number of characters on a line to keep the margins correct if you change character widths.

Special Effects and Emphasis

The printer offers two ways of emphasizing text and also allows you to use underlining, superscripts, subscripts, and italics. These features can be controlled directly by software commands. Many application programs can also produce some of these effects. See your application program manual for details.

Emphasized and double-strike printing

Emphasized and double-strike printing can give words and phrases added prominence. In emphasized mode, each character is printed twice as the print head moves across the paper, with the dots in the second pass printed slightly to the right of the first pass. This process produces darker, more fully formed characters.

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In double-strike mode, the print head prints each line twice, making the text bolder. For even greater boldness, emphasized and double- strike can be combined. The following samples show the different effects you can achieve using these modes alone and in combination.

T h i s i s R O M A N p r i n t i n g .

This is ROMAN, emphasized.

T h i s i s R O M A N , d o u b l e - s t r i k e .

This is ROMAN, with both.

Italic printing

You can print italics by using the ESC 4 software command. This is true no matter how DIP switch 1-7 is set.

T h i s i s R O M A N p r i n t i n g .

T h i s i s R O M A N i t a l i c s .

Underlining, strike-through, and overlining

The underline, strike-through, and overline modes are useful for highlighting selected text. This feature can be used to score spaces, subscripts, and superscripts without a break. You can choose from a variety of line styles, including single, double, broken, or continuous.

See the ESC ( - command in Chapter 9 for more information.

T h i s i s c o n t i n u o u s u n d e r l i n i n g .

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Superscripts and subscripts

Superscripts and subscripts can be used for printing footnote numbers and mathematical formulas. The example below shows underlining and subscripts combined in a mathematical formula.

average = (a1 + a2 + . . . . . . . . . . + an ) n

Outline and shadow

The outline and shadow features are useful for adding variation and emphasis to text that you wish to stand out, such as headings. The following samples show the outline and shadow features individually, plus a combination of outline with shadow.

Selecting Typestyles With Master Select

Your printer has a special ESCape code called Master Select that allows you to choose many combinations of these nine modes: 10 cpi, 12 cpi, proportional spacing, condensed, emphasized, double-strike, double-wide, italics, and underline. For more information on sending

ESCape codes to your printer, see Chapter 9.

The format of the Master Select code is shown below:

ASCII:

Decimal:

Hexadecimal:

ESC !

n

27 33 n

1B 21 n

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The variable n is a number that identifies the mode or combination of modes. To find the value of n, use the following table to add up either the decimal or hexadecimal numbers for the features you want.

For example, to print a title you may want to use double-wide 12 cpi characters printed in the double-strike mode. You would add three numbers together to calculate the value of n.

12 cpi 1

D o u b l e - s t r i k e 1 6

D o u b l e - w i d e 3 2 n = 49

After calculating the value of n, you use the Master Select command to send the value to the printer.

ASCII:

Decimal:

Hexadecimal:

ESC !

1

27 33 49

1B 21 31

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The print quality and font must be set separately, using SelecType or the ESC x and ESC k commands. There are two more things to consider when using the Master Select command: l l

Master Select cancels any of the other listed features that you do not set. For example, if you have already set a different character width and you use Master Select to set emphasized double-strike, the character width is reset to 10 cpi.

Proportional spacing overrides 10, 12, and 15 cpi.

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