Star Micronics Radix User Manual page 137

Creating Your
Own Characters
123
Proportional Characters
Up until now, all the characters that your Radix has printed
have been of a fixed width-either 10,12, or
17
(or
5, 6
or
8.5
in
expanded mode) characters per inch. Whichever pitch you select,
all the characters are the same width. You'll notice though, that in
typeset books, such as this one, each character has a slightly
different width. For instance, the "i" is quite narrow, and the "W"
is very wide. This is more pleasing to the eye and easier to read.
So, if you're going to go to the trouble of designing your own
download characters for Radix, you might as well make them
pleasing to the eye! Proportional download characters allow you
to do just that. As you'll remember from our initial discussion of
download character definition, part of the attribute byte is for pro-
portional width data. We skipped over that, with the promise of
describing it later. Well now is the time!
Dejining proportional cha~cters
Except for the actual width, defining characters for propor-
tional printing is exactly the same as defining normal width
download characters. Characters can range from 4 to II dots
wide. This means that characters can be as narrow as one-third
the normal width. The examples in Figure 11-13 show characters
of different widths. These characters are defined in the program
that follows.
10 'Downloads proportional characters into RAM.
20 OPEN "LPTl:" AS #l : WIDTH #1,255
30
FOR C = 1 TO r,
40
READ C$,CODE
50
PRINT #l,CHR$(27) O*" CHR$(l) C$ CHR$(CODE) ;
60
FOR I = 1 TO 11
70 READ BITS
80 PRINT #l,CHR$(BITS) ;
90
NEXT I
100 NEXT C
110 CLOSE #l
120 'Print a sample.
130
LPRINT rl
Mississippi"
140
LPRINT
150 LPRINT "ROM char set, normal spacing."
160
LPRINT