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Radix User's
Manual
Figure 11-3. Dots can be inside boxes or straddle the vertical lines of the grid.
Defining Your Own Characters
You've seen how the engineers at Star designed their charac-
ters by using a grid to lay out the dots. Now you can define charac-
ters exactly the same way. Make up some grids (photocopy Figure
11-4
if you wish) and get ready to be creative! (just in case you are
not feeling creative, and to make our explanations a little clearer,
we'll be using a "bullet" as an example of a download character.
You can see how we've laid it out in Figure
11-5.
You'll find this
useful for highlighting a list of items, as we have done at the begin-
ning of each chapter in this manual.
You'll notice that Figure
11-4
includes a lot of information
around the grid. Don't be intimidated; we'll explain each item as
we come to it in our discussion of defining and actually printing
download characters. You may have noticed another difference
between this grid and the one shown in Figure 11-S: it's only seven
boxes high. Which leads us to. . .
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Rule I: Download chamcters are seven dots high
As you noticed in Figure
11-2,
capital letters, most lowercase
letters, and most special characters use only the top seven pins of
the printhead. This is also the standard for download characters,
so our grid is only seven dots high.
It's also possible to use the bottom seven pins, just as the "g",
"
P
", "q", and "y" of the standard character sets do. These are
called descenders (because the bottom of the character descends
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