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XPM 80™ Thermal Printer Family
Another family of commands of interest to us here is the text commands. These commands
involve printing text in response to ASCII data sent to the printer. The printer itself contains
one or more character sets. In these character sets, one printable character corresponds to
one ASCII character. There are also commands for positioning and modifying the printout
from these character sets, such as tab and indent commands and commands to enlarge the
internal character set by some factor.
When printing from the internal character sets (we'll call that "ASCII printing" here for
convenience), characters are sent to the printer and the corresponding characters from the
character set are printed.
advantage is that the host need only send one character per printed character. So if 40
characters are being printed on a line, for example, only 40 bytes of data (plus any overhead
for formatting, indenting, etc.) need be transmitted over the interface. In other words, you can
print a lot of text and need send only a little data. The downside is a lack of flexibility. In
today's Windows
screens, in the same font, size, etc. as we see it. But with ASCII printing, what will be printed
will be based on the printer's internal character set.
The other type of printing we'll call "Graphic printing". This is what happens when you print to
an ink jet or laser printer from your PC. The information displayed on the screen is sent to a
print driver. This print driver, which is unique for each printer, translates what is on the screen
as a graphic into graphic Native Commands to be sent to the printer. Everything printed
through a print driver prints as graphics. It takes a lot more data to transmit graphics than
to transmit ASCII. In our 40 character example, assuming a 12 x 20 pixel character, the
Hengstler XPM 80™ printer would require 1,600 bytes to print one line. (Please note that
these are estimates, and that various compression routines also impact the print speed.)
The advantage of Graphic printing, then, is the ability to print anything; pictures, text, photos,
etc. exactly as you see it on your screen. The disadvantage is that to do so, much more data
(40 times as much data in our example) must be sent over the interface.
As a practical matter, then, it comes down to this. If you are doing ASCII printing, you can
use USB or a serial interface. Both are fast enough to handle the smaller amount of data
being sent. But if you are doing Graphic printing, USB is a far better choice due to its higher
speed, and serial may increase the time to complete a printout to an unacceptably long
period.
4.
Unpacking
Care should be taken when unpacking your XPM 80™ printer to preserve the packing
material for possible future use. XPM 80™ packing is specifically designed to protect the
printer from damage in the harsh environment of trucks and aircraft. Please be sure to use
this packing if it ever becomes necessary to reship your XPM 80™ unit.
5.
Major Options
5.1. Barcode Scanner Option
XPM 80™ printers can be supplied with an optional barcode scanning feature. The purpose
of this option is to scan preprinted barcodes on the non-coated (back) side of the printout.
The latest scanned barcode is stored in the printer memory and can be read out through the
printer interface via a query command.
Reference D 690 004 for details on reading the data from the printer.
Part No. D 690 019
This has both advantages and disadvantages.
®
world, we are all used to printing exactly what we see on our computer
Mod. No. 4 051015 Eli1
HENGSTLER
See the XPM 80™ Emulation Command Set
The biggest
page 17 of 32
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