Special Speeds; Half-Speed Mode; Immediate Print Mode - Epson FX-80 User Manual

The international character sets are pretty easy to use. And that's
nice . . . in any language!
Special Speeds
You can control the speed of the FX-80's printing in a couple of
ways. You can set it to print at half its usual speed. Or you can cause it
to print one character at a time, immediately upon your input. Each of
these capabilities is accessed as a mode,
Hali-Speed Mode
Epson takes pride in the FX-80's great speed. It can print 160 charac-
ters in a second. (That's faster than you can sneeze.) But the FX-80 will
go slower if you want it to: the Half-Speed Mode prints 80 characters
per second (cps). The command sequence is:
LPRINT CHR$(27)"sl"
I
Lower-case s
"1" turns half speed ON, and, as usual, the "0" version of the ON
command turns it OFE (Use CHR$(115)CHR$(1) if your computer
can't send lower-case letters.)
Why would anyone want to make the printer work at half its nor-
mal speed?! Good question. The main advantage to half-speed print-
ing is a quieter run (for those late night printing sessions).
But it goes slower yet . . .
Immediate Print Mode
Didn't think you got an electric typewriter along with the printer,
did you? Well, the FX-80 has an Immediate Print Mode that does a
pretty fair imitation of one. In this mode, all data is printed as soon as
it is received by the printer, and the paper feeds back and forth so you
can see the line that is currently being printed. This kind of instant
feedback can be especially helpful in telecommunications.
Before we unveil the secrets of this feature, let's review the normal
operation of the printer buffer. Enter this NEW program:
NEW
21l' A$="": INPUT "TYPE A LETTER"jA$
JIl' IF A$="" THEN 51l'
41l' LPRINT
A$j:
GOTO 21l'
51l' LPRINT
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