Commodore MPS 1200 - Chapter 8 Creating Characters

Chapter 8
Creating Characters
Even with its correspondence quality, pica, elite, proportional,
expanded, compressed, emphasized, doublestrike, italic, vertically
enlarged print, reverse print, superscript
and subscript styles, some
folks still can't find just the right character style on their MPS 1200.
For these discriminating people we have just one thing to say: go
ahead-design your own characters. And with the MPS 1200 you
can!
This feature is useful not only for the artists with a discriminating
eye
who want to add a little flair to their printing. Instead, you
could design a few unique characters for special applications such as
business, 'scientific, or a foreign language not included in the MPS
1200's international character sets.
HOW THE MPS 1200 PRINTS
CHARACTERS
In Chapter 2, we discussed how a dot matrix printer like the MPS
1200 prints characters. The key is in the print head, in which the
pins strike the
ribbon in a predetermined pattern as it sweeps across
the page. Figures 2-1 and 2-2
show a few of those patterns for the
H, y, and r.
It's no coincidence that the dots that form the characters appear to
be in neat
rows and columns, for that's the way they must be
designed. When the MPS 1200's character sets were designed, the
engineers used a
matrix six dots wide and nine dots high (there are
nine wires in the
print head, remember?). Figure 8-1 shows .i11~1
such a matrix with a character design superimposed. There is :1
similar design for every character the MPS 1200 knows how I()
print, and the data from these patterns is stored in the prillll·1 \,
memory.
8-1